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It's a contradictory document that's been cobbled together over thousands of years. It's outlasted kingdoms, many, many kingdoms. It's very interesting, it turns out that a book is more durable than stone. It's more durable than a castle. It's more durable than an empire.

There's a lot we don't understand about these stories. We don't understand how they came about. We don't really understand how they were put together. We don't understand why they had such an unbelievable impact on civilization. We don't understand how people could have believed them. We don't understand what it means that we don't believe them now, or even what it would mean if we did believe them. And then, on top of all that, there's the additional problem, which isn't specific to me, but is certainly relevant to me, that no matter how educated you are, you're not educated enough to discuss the psychological significance of the Biblical stories.

The best way to learn about something is to talk about it. And when I'm lecturing, I'm thinking, I'm not trying to tell you what I know for sure

One of the things Nietzsche said was that he didn't believe that the scientific revolution would have ever got off the ground if it hadn't been for Christianity

Nietzsche believed that Catholicization of the phenomena of life and of history produced the kind of mind that was then capable of transcending its dogmatic foundations and then concentrating on something else.

The spirit of the truth that was developed by Christianity turned on the roots of Christianity. And everyone woke up and said or thought something like, "Well how is it that we came to believe any of this?" It's like waking up one day and noting that you really don't know why you put the Christmas tree up. You'd been doing it for a long time, and that's what people do. But the ritual lasts long after the reasons have been forgotten

Nietzsche believed it's not possible to be free, in some sense, unless you have been a slave.

There's a very large amount that we don't know about the structure of experience, that we don't know about reality. And we have our articulated representations of the world, and then you can think outside of that. There are things we know absolutely nothing about. And there's a buffer between them. And those are things we sort of know something about. We don't know them in an articulated way,

People can know things at one level without being able to speak what they know at another. So in some sense, the thoughts rise up from the body, and they do that in moods, and they do that in images, and they do that in actions. And we have all sorts of ways that we understand, before we understand in a fully articulated manner.

Artists are the mediators between the absolute unknown and the things we know for sure.

What we know is established on a form of knowledge that we don't really understand.

If our articulated knowledge is out of sync with our dream, then we become dissociated internally. We think things we don't act out, and we act out things we don't dream. And that produces a kind of sickness of the spirit.

Nietzsche knew that when we knocked the slats out of the base of Western civilization by destroying this representation, this "god ideal," let's say, that we would destabilize and move back and forth violently between nihilism and the extremes of ideology. He predicted that in the twentieth century that hundreds of millions of people would die because of the replacement of these underlying dreamlike structures with this rational but deeply incorrect representation of the world.

Westerners, us, we undermine ourselves all the time with our searching intellect.

Lots of times, when I’ve been treating people with depression, for example, or anxiety, they have existential issues. It's not just some psychiatric condition. It's not just that they're tapped off of normal because their brain chemistry is faulty, although sometimes that happens to be the case. It's that they are overwhelmed by the suffering and complexity of their life and they're not sure why it's reasonable to continue with it

I started to understand that our articulated systems of thought are embedded in something like a dream and that that dream was informed, in a complex way, by the way we act. We act out things we don't understand all the time. If that wasn't the case, then we wouldn't need psychology or sociology or anthropology or any of that because we would be completely transparent to ourselves. And we're clearly not. So, we're much more complicated than we understand, which means that the way that we behave contains way more information than we know.

Part of the dream that surrounds our articulated knowledge is being extracted as a consequence of us watching each other behave and telling stories about it for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. Extracting out patterns of behavior that characterize humanity. And trying to represent them

Every single one of your ancestors reproduced successfully for three and a half billion years. It's absolutely unbelievable. We rose out of the dirt and the muck and here we are, conscious, but not knowing. And we're trying to figure out who we are. A story, or several stories, that we've been telling for three thousand years seems to me to have something to offer.

It's a mystery, this book. 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. What's going on? How did that happen?

People lived inside a dream. You know, it was Freud who really popularized the idea of the unconscious mind. We take this for granted to such a degree today that we don't understand how revolutionary the idea was.

Your perceptions and your actions and your thoughts are all informed and shaped by unconscious motivations that are not part of your voluntary control.

You're a loose collection of living sub-personalities, each with its own set of motivations and perceptions and emotions and rationales, all of that. And you have limited control over that, so you're like a plurality of internal personalities that's loosely linked into a unity. And you know that because you can't control yourself very well,

Jung got very interested in dreams and started to understand the relationship between dreams and myths. Because he would see in his clients' dreams echoes of stories that he knew because he was deeply read in mythology. 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.

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. So it's like the dream is the birthplace of thinking, that's a good way of thinking about it. So because it's the birthplace of thinking, it's not that clear. It's doing its best to formulate something.

A thought appears in your head, right? That's obvious. Bang, it's nothing you ever ask about. But what the hell does that mean? A thought appears in your head. What kind of ridiculous explanation is that? It just doesn't help with anything. Where does it come from? Well, nowhere. It just appears in my head. Okay, well, that's not a very sophisticated explanation, as it turns out.

Jung was a great believer in the dream, and I know that dreams will tell you things that you don't know. 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? How does that make any sense?

There's nothing random about dreams.

Where does the information in dreams come from? I think where it comes from is that we watch the patterns that everyone acts out. We've watched that forever and we've got some representations of those patterns. That's part of our cultural history, that's what's embedded in stories, in fictional accounts, of the story between good and evil.

Numbers are an abstraction from the underlying reality but no one in their right mind would really think numbers aren't true. You can even make a case that the numbers are more real than the things that they represent, right? Because the abstraction is so insanely powerful. Once you have mathematics, you're just deadly. You can move the world with mathematics. It's not obvious that the abstraction is less real than the more concrete reality.

We watched ourselves and we extracted out some stories. We imitated each other and we represented that in drama, and then we distilled the drama and we got a representation of the distillation. And then we did it again and again and again

We've been watching each other trying to figure out what we're up to across that entire span of time, some of that knowledge is built right into our bodies. Which is why we can dance with each other for example, right? Because understanding isn't just something that you have as an abstraction , it's something that you act out,

How do you live in the world? It's the eternal question of human beings. And I guess we're the only species that has ever really asked that question because all the other animals, they just go and do whatever they do. Not us! It's a question for us

"Everybody acts out a myth, but very few people know what their myth is. And you should know what your myth is because it might be a tragedy. And maybe you don't want it to be” Jung

And Marduk, he was a Mesopotamian deity, and this is what happened, as an empire grew out the post ice age, say fifteen thousand years ago, ten thousand years ago, all these tribes came together. And these tribes each had their own deity, their own image of the ideal. But then they started to occupy the same territory. And so then one tribe had god A, and one tribe had god B, and one could wipe the other one out. And then it would just be god A who wins. But that's not so good because, well, maybe you want to trade with those people, or maybe you don't want to lose half your population in a war, something like that. So then you have to have an argument about whose god is going to take priority. Which ideal is going to take priority? What seems to happen is that's represented in mythology as a battle of the gods in sort of celestial space. But from a practical perspective, it's more like an ongoing dialog. You believe this, I believe this. You believe that, I believe this. How are we going to meld that together? So you take god A and you take god B, and maybe what you do is extract god C from them.

What's leadership? It's the capacity to see what the hell's in front of your face and maybe in every direction. And then the capacity to use your language properly, in a transformative manner, and to transform chaos into order

Marduk story, for example is the idea that if there are things that upset you, chaotic, terrible, serpentine monstrous underworld things that threaten you, the best thing to do is to open your eyes, get your speech organized, and go out and confront the thing, and make the world out of it.

We know in psychotherapy, for example, that you're much better off confronting your fears head on than if you are to wait and let them find you.

We've extracted this story, this strange collection of stories, with all its errors and its repetitions, and its peculiarities, out of the entire history that we've been able to collect ideas. And it's the best we've been able to do.

That's why you think, so that you can generate a pattern of action and test it out in a fictional world before you embody it and die because you're foolish

I'm a psychoanalytic thinker. And what that means is that I believe that people are collections of sub-personalities, and that those sub-personalities are alive.

Bible is the first hyper-linked book. Technically speaking, the present cannot affect the past, but if you were looking at a piece of literature, that's not right. Because when you write the end, you know what was at the beginning, and when you write the beginning or edit it, you know what's at the end. And so you can weave the whole thing together. And there's sixty-five thousand cross-references in the Bible

And so there's an infinite number of ways that you can look at the world. And so how do we know that any one way is better than any other way? That's a good question. Now the Post-Modern answer was we can't. And that's not a good answer because you drown in chaos under those circumstances, right? You can't make sense of anything.

The way that we're constructed neurophysiologically is that we don't experience any positive emotion unless we have an aim, and we can see ourselves progressing toward that aim.

I think of pain as the fundamental reality because no one disputes it

However you act now better not compromise how you're going to be in a year. Because that'd just be counter-productive

I remember there's this Simpsons episode. And Homer puts a quart of mayonnaise in vodka. And Marge says “you know, you shouldn't really do that”. And Homer says “that's a problem for future Homer. I'm sure glad I'm not that guy”.

No one can tolerate being alone for any length of time. We can't maintain our own sanity without continual feedback from other people because it's too damn complicated.

I believe that what people believe to be true is what they act out, not what they say

Part of the reason that I want to assess these books from a literary and aesthetic and evolutionary perspective is to extract out something of value, something of real value that's practical.

That's another thing that I think interferes with our relationship with a collection of books like the Bible. It's that you're called upon to believe things that no one can believe. And that's not good because that's a form of lie, as far as I can tell. And then you have to scrap the whole thing because in principle the whole thing is about truth, 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?

What the Bible stories and stories in general are trying to represent is the lived experience of conscious individuals,

It's a funny thing that the Bible has a story, because it wasn't written as a book, right? It was assembled from a whole bunch of different books. And the fact that it got assembled into something resembling a story is quite remarkable

Many people wrote it. And many people edited it, and many people assembled it over a vast stretch of time. And we have very few documents like that. And so just because we have a document like that is sufficient reason to look at it as a remarkable phenomena and try to understand what it is that it's trying to communicate

You can conceptualize a future, in your imagination. And then you can work and make that manifest. You participate in the process of creation.

What happens in Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" is that the main character, whose name is Raskolnikov, decides that there's no intrinsic value to other people. And that as a consequence, he can do whatever he wants. It's only cowardice that stops him from acting. Right? Because, well, why would it be anything else if the value of other people is just an arbitrary superstition? Then why can't I do exactly what I want, when I want? Which is the psychopath's viewpoint. Well, so Raskolnikov does. He kills someone who's a very horrible person, and he has very good reasons for killing her. He's half-starved and a little bit insane, and possessed by this ideology, it's a brilliant, brilliant layout. And he finds out something after he kills her, which is that the post-killing Raskolnikov and the pre-killing Raskolnikov are not the same person, even a little bit. Because he's broken a rule, like he's broken a serious rule, and there's no going back. And "Crime and Punishment" is the best investigation I know of, of what happens if you take the notion that there's nothing divine about the individual seriously

It's uncanny to read Dostoevsky's "The Possessed" or the "The Devils," depending on the translation, and then to read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" because one is fiction and prophecy and the second is hey look it turned out exactly the same way that Dostoevsky said it would for exactly the same reasons

Here's what God as a father is like. You can enter into a covenant with it. You can make a bargain with it. Now you think about that. Money is like that. Because money is a bargain you make with the future. So we've structured our world so that you can negotiate with the future. And I don't think that we would've got to the point where we could do that without having this idea to begin with. You can act as if the future is a reality.

Sacrifices were acted out for a very long period of time and now they're psychological. We know that you can sacrifice something valuable in the present and expect that you're negotiating with something that represents the transcendent future. And that's an amazing human discovery. Like, no other creature can do that, to act as if the future is real.

One of the things that's weird about the Judeo-Christian tradition is that God and Nature are not the same thing at all

You know, you have arguments with your wife, you have arguments with you children. That's that chaotic state. Because no one's been able to formulate a habitable order from that domain of controversy and confusion. And then, through dialogue, you erect a structure that's a house that you can both live in. And so that's the idea, of making the world out of that chaos

Beauty is so valuable, and we're so afraid of it.

I can't tell if I'm an advocate of the religious viewpoint or its worst possible critic. Because I am doing my best to make it rational

The idea that human beings will be redeemed moves from the utopian state vision to the responsibility of the individual

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