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0:02
[Music] the question is how do you differentiate the utility of behavioral / psycho therapeutic treatments for conditions like depression versus medical treatments okay so the first thing I would say is don't underestimate the utility of medical interventions depression is a cat catastrophe it carries with it a very high suicide rate and it also levels people out and it's really hard on their families and so and it and it's physiologically extraordinarily damaging and so if
0:37
you're in a depressive state and it's severe you can try an antidepressant you'll know in a month if it works if it works well maybe it'll help you get your life together like we could say well maybe you're depressed because your life isn't very well together could be sometimes people are depressed their life is just it isn't fine because no one's life is fine everyone's life is a tragedy but sometimes people have their lives in order as much as you could expect anyone to have they have friends
1:05
they have an intimate relationship they have a career that they like you know they're they're qualified industrious people working hard on what they're doing and and and really playing a minimum number of games with themselves and they're terribly depressed antidepressant man that's sometimes that will just fix it and so hooray like your biological entity if there's something out there that can help you strengthen yourself so that you can prevail great and you know people you hear everyone
1:35
takes antidepressants you know everyone's taking them just like no one takes those bloody things without serious consideration half the time I spend with my clients who are depressed is often the two years long attempt to get them to tentatively try an antidepressant because they're so guilty that they're relying on an external crutch to sort out their lives that they can't even tolerate it but you know I say well look man what if you had diabetes you're not gonna take your
2:00
insulin it's like you got stressed you blew out at your weakest point that's what happens when you get stressed if there's something out there that might help you it's like try it for God's sake you'll know in a month and you just stop that doesn't work now having said that you want to do a multi-dimensional analysis it's like well do you have any friends do you have an intimate relationship or are you pursuing one do you have a reasonable career are you as educated as you are intelligent do you
2:27
have something useful to do with your time outside of work do you have a drug or alcohol problem are there other behavioral issues like sleep dysregulation and lack of eating that are contributing to the pathology you want to differentiate all of that and wherever you can make a behavioral intervention so much the better but sometimes - you're dealing with people whose lives are so wrecked that they don't even know where to start they're different than the ones who have
2:49
everything in order say and you say well try this man maybe you won't cut your throat in the next month because if you're dead it's going to be hard to work with you and so so medical interventions anything if you're sick you do what it's necessary to get better and you leave your pride behind if you if you have to and that that says nothing about the utility of the behavioral interventions you want to hit the problem with everything you have at your disposal but some antidepressants
3:20
especially especially for people whose lives are together and who are depressed antidepressants can be absolutely miraculous so you know when you hear about the clinical evidence in their favor being iffy and that's partly because the diagnosis of depression isn't very well formulated there's it's very different to have a terrible life than to be depressed and antidepressants can only help you so much if you have a terrible life so yeah
3:50
you want to stay inside this little map because it's working you want to get from point A to point eight point B and this is good this indicates that you are moving forward that's the first thing it indicates and the second thing it indicates which is even more important and you'll never hear this from behavioral psychologists is that your map is correct so every time you move a little bit forward and something that you want happens it says oh the game I'm playing is the right game and so not
4:15
only does the reward indicate progress it indicates that the frame within which progress is being calculated is the right frame and that's good because it's the frame that makes things irrelevant and you want them to stay irrelevant so if you don't move forward and you start to question the frame that's way worse than merely not moving forward you get a bad examine what do you think what the hell am i doing in university anyways it's like probably that's not
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the first place you should go with that piece of information and you think well why why is that worse well as far as I can tell your map of you as University student is a comprehensive representation it tells you what you should do every day it kind of tells you where you're going in the future and if something emerges as an anomaly you get worse grade than you expected and you blow that whole map it's like okay what have you been doing for the last four years what kind of high school student
5:09
were you how clueless are you about how you're arranging your future what's your identity going to be if you're not going to be a student where are you gonna end up in five years it's like so it's like a that little grade that bad grade is like a portal through which snakes can crawl and that's exactly how you respond to it especially if you open the door too much well maybe this means that I shouldn't be in university well one of the rules is don't you want to you want
5:34
to constrain the anomalous event to the minimal necessary domain it's really really important you want to do that when you're arguing with your partner which you'll do all the time we have an argument well I should never have married you it's like no no that's not the first response that's a bad response or here's a really good one you've always done that sort of thing and you always will it's like oh good great it's like the only answer to that is to hit someone because like you're done right
6:02
you're you're like that you've always like that there isn't a chance that you could be repaired and none of it is acceptable it's like the person's gonna fight with you right away because what else are they gonna do so what you want to do is you want to minimize it isn't rationalization you want to say okay this person did something that disrupted our joint map okay what's the smallest possible thing they could do to put it back together and you have to know well
6:25
we need to make a plan so you don't do it again or we need to have a discussion so that you know that it wasn't a good thing to do but I'm not going to go after your whole character I'm gonna say when I come home and you're watching TV just come to the door and say hello not don't you love me or something like that it's like no no you just have to walk to the door and like give me a hug or something and then that's good enough and so then the other person might be
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able to tolerate that much corrective information maybe if you're kind of nice about it and you also understand that they're probably going to have something equally horrible to say about you in the next 15 minutes because you're gonna do something stupid so so you don't want to you don't want to open the door so that every possible snake comes crawling through because that's a pathway to depression and you actually see that happening in depressed people is that
7:16
every small event produces a cascade through their entire value system and they end up saying well that's just another reason that I should jump off a bridge and they really see it that way it's really awful because they've got no defenses it's like well I I didn't do so well in this course it's like I'm gonna get a bad mark in the or in the exam I'm gonna get bad mark in the course that's going to screw up my ability to finish my degree I'm never going to get into
7:42
the field of my choice it's just another piece of indication that I'm useless and that life isn't worthwhile bang I'm going to jump off a bridge and if you're really depressed it's like each of those things hits you with the certainty of truth it's really not good and so you want to be careful you want to be careful about walking down that pathway when you make a mistake you think okay what's the narrowest framework of interpretation within which I can I can understand this that will require
8:09
minimal behavioral change to decrease the probability that it will happen again it's Mental Hygiene fund yes yeah we'll get to that we'll get to that that is the next question it's because they don't exist in isolation so and that's another thing frequently when you when you hear behavioral accounts of cognitive processes they generally only focus on as if it's an isolated thing it's not it exists scalable it's scalable a bunch of ways it's scalable temporarily because
8:44
what you do now is associated with what you'll do tomorrow and that with what you'll do next week and so forth so it has to be scalable temporarily and it's also scalable socially right so it has an effect on you that has an effect on your family that has an effect on the community and so forth and so you don't want to take it's very difficult to think through the effect of your action and all those scaling levels simultaneously but but you have mechanisms that allow you to do that and
9:13
we'll see I think that the sense of let's assume that you're not lying to yourself constantly so your head isn't full of chaos and garbage and you have reasonable relationships with people in the world I think that this is leaping way ahead I think that your sense of meaningful engagement with what you're doing is the psychophysiological marker that you're acting in a way that takes all of the stacked representations into account simultaneously because you're you're you're like you're trying to
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figure out where you are and you might think well that means where I am in this room but look this room is not a simple thing right it's nested it's it's a subset of the university that's a subset of society it's a subset of your life the room is a complicated thing and you need to figure out where you should be in the room and you can't do that sure surely with perception because all you see is me and some of the wall right it's you've got this little narrow this
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little narrow portal and so you can't really rely on your perceptions to orient you but you do orient yourself and I think what you do is you its engagement it's like does this seem meaningful and deep and engaging yes then it's an indication that it's serving multiple master simultaneously so both maybe both socially and also temporarily and so I think the sense of meaning is actually an instinct that Orient's people in time and space it's not an empathy nomina it's the most fundamental form of
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perception and that's the only optimistic thought that I've ever been able to derive from psychology is that that actually could be true it could be that the sense of meaning is an orienting reflex and that would be wonderful if it was true because it would make it real you know and it's one of the you know the one of the devastating elements of nihilism is something like well who the hell cares what you're doing what difference is it going to make in a million years it's
11:10
like your sense of meaning is just an illusion you know you're you're a limited creature in a limited place and nothing you do really matters it's like that's a powerful argument especially if you're an objective materialist and a reductionist it's a killer argument but it looks to me like it's wrong it's actually wrong because meaning looks to me like it's an actual phenomena it does say that your your position properly between chaos and order or something
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like that it's real so well so we'll see we're going to develop that argument because if if it's real you want to know that because it gives you something to stand on you know maybe it's as real as pain but it's not pain it's something positive and you need something positive that you can rely on alright so and the psychoanalysts I think it air too much on the side of the subject they tend to think that too much of you is inside of you and too little of you is outside of
12:09
you and part of the reason I believe that is because of my clinical experience I love the psychoanalyst man they're brilliant they're brilliant they're deep they grapple with real problems like with the problems when people have real problems and I mean profound problems they're really profound moral problems or problems of good and evil really you know there are things going on in their family that are so terrible that well that there there are sometimes fatal you know lie upon
12:41
lie upon lie upon lie for Cades and decades and decades it's awful and that's not exactly inside them it's out there in the world and lots of the people that I see very famous critic of psychology I can't remember his name but I probably will criticize the practice of psychology quite effectively in the leave in the early 60s the myth of mental illness by Thomas says Szasz it's classic you should read it if you're interested in psychology read it like it's a classic and he basically said
13:29
most people have problems in living they don't have psychological problems and so I've experienced despite my love for the psychoanalysts very frequently what I'm doing as a therapist is helping people have a life that would work you know and you can parameterize that it's like what do you need how about some friends that people kind of like that how about an intimate relationship with someone that you can trust that maybe has a future that'd be good how about a career that
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puts you in a dominant Archy somewhere so at least you've got some possibility of rising some possibility of stabilizing yourself and our schedule in a routine because no one can live without a routine you just forget that if you guys don't have a routine I would recommend like you get one going because you cannot be mentally healthy without a routine you need to pick a time to get up whatever time you want but pick one and stick to it because otherwise you
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dis regulate your circadian rhythms and they regulate your mood and eat something in the morning I had lots of clients who've had anxiety disorders I had one client who was literally starving very smart girl sheet there's very little that she liked she kind of tried to subsist on like half a cup of rice a day she came to me and said I have no energy I come home all I want to do is watch the same movie over and over what like is that weird and I thought well it depends on how
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hard you work you know it's a little weird but whatever it's familiar you're looking for comfort so I did an analysis of her diet it's like three quarters of a cup of rice it's like you're starving eat something you know you'll feel better so she modified her diet and you're all her anxiety went away and she had some energy it's like yeah you got to eat so a schedule that's a good thing man your brain will thank you for it it will stabilize your nervous system with it's
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a bit of a plan that's a good thing you need a career you need something productive to do with your time you need to regulate your use of drugs and alcohol most particularly alcohol because that does even a lot of people you need a family like the family you have your parents and all that be nice if you all got along you could work on that that's a good thing to work on and then you know you probably need children at some point that's life that's what life is and if you're missing you know
16:09
you may have a good reason to not be operating on one of those dimensions it's not mandatory but I can tell you that if you're not operating reasonably well on four I think I mentioned six if you're not operating reasonably well on at least three of them there's no way you're going to be psychologically thriving and that's more pragmatic in some sense than psychological right human beings have a nature there's things we need and if we have them well that's good and if we don't have them
16:42
well then we feel the lack and so behaviorists behavioral psychologists concentrate a lot more on that sort of thing you know it's practical it's like strategizing make a career plan figure out how to negotiate because that's bloody important figure out how to say what you need figure out how to tell the truth to people figure out how to listen to your partner in particular because if you listen to them they will actually tell you what they want and sometimes you can give it to them and
17:13
maybe they'll return the favor and if you practice that for like 15 years well then maybe you're constantly giving each other what you want well hooray that would be good and then there's two of you under all circumstances and it's better to have two brains than one because people think differently because of their temperament mostly and so the negotiation is where the wisdom arises and it's part of the transformation the psychological transformation that's attendant on an intimate relationship
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and one of the fundamental purposes of a long-term intimate relationship so we're starting to be able to put the traits to sort of nail the traits down to their underlying biology with regards to neuroticism well if you're high in neuroticism you're more sensitive to anxiety and that's it regulated at least in part by the hippocampus and and generated in part by the amygdala there's another part of the brain called the periagua aqueduct or gray that seems to be associated with the experience of
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pain and pain is quite a complex phenomena depression is pain like grief is pain like social isolation is pain like disappointment is pain like there's anxiety components to that too and so neuroticism seems to be something like threshold for activation in those negative emotion systems so if you're higher in neuroticism one unit of uncertainty might produce let's say three units of psychophysiological response whereas if you're lower in neuroticism one unit of uncertainty
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might produce one unit of psycho physiological response it's hard you know obviously that's a simplified schematic but there's variability because if something unexpected or her threatening happens to you it isn't obvious how upset you should get one answer what might be brush it off it's nothing another answer might be it's a bloody catastrophe and often when something uncertain or threatening occurs you don't have enough information at your disposal to make a full
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determination of the potential import of this of the circumstance especially if it's uncertain and so then you have to guess at how upset you should be and where you are on the normal distribution with regards to trait neuroticism say that sort of determines what your guests on average is going to be so you know the other with conscientiousness say you might say well how hard should you work well that's a really difficult question if you're gonna die tomorrow and then
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you probably shouldn't work very hard today at all so one thing you might say is that the degree to which you should work hard is dependent on your assumptions about the stability of the future we actually know this to be true because if you put people in wildly uncertain circumstances they discount the future which is exactly what you should do right it's only makes sense to store up goods for future consumption if the future is likely to be very similar to the past and the present you need a
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stable society for that and conscientiousness only works in a stable society because all you do otherwise if you're piling up goods which is kind of what conscientious people do is leaving them there for the criminals to take or waiting for the next chaotic upheaval to wipe out everything that you've stored and so even conscientiousness is a kind of guess hard-working people say well you know sacrifice the present for the future that's great as long as the future is
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going to be there and you can predict it but if it's not going to be there and it's unpredictable then the right response is take what you can take right now well the getting's good now you know obviously there are troubles with that too it I'm speaking you know I'm offering rough rules of thumb but I'm trying to provide you with some indication of how and why these difference in value structures exist because they're applicable in different environments you know sometimes in a
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dangerous social environment it's not obvious that being an extroverted person is a good idea because extroverted people they stand out especially if they're extroverted and creative right because not only are they noisy and and dominant and assertive they're also colorful and and flamboyant and provocative what happens to people is that as they move towards zero positive feedback loops get set up so they're more likely to hit zero and as they move away from zero positive feedback loops
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get set up so that they're increasingly more likely to move away from zero so here's an example let's say you're not doing too bad so maybe you're in the middle of the normal distribution then you lose your job okay and so let's say you're a conscientious person and we can say just for the sake of argument that you lose your job because of mass layoffs in your company so it has nothing to do with you it's fundamentally it's just like luck of the draw basically but then what happens to
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you well if you're conscientious you're gonna you're gonna go after yourself pretty hard so you're gonna and especially if you're also high in neuroticism it's gonna depress you to lose your job and maybe you're in a situation where you just for one reason or another you don't have that many other opportunities now maybe you should look for them but maybe you're in a depressed strata of the economy or you're geographically located somewhere that makes moving difficult or so on and
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so forth you know so but you you lose a job and then you start to get depressed because of that well then as you start to get depressed you know it decreases the probability that you're gonna look for a job but also maybe starts to put stress on your family and it also starts to decrease the probability that you're in going to engage in positive social interaction so now not only are you unemployed and suffering from economic stress but your marriage is starting to suffer and
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you're starting to isolate yourself from your friends and then of course as your marriage suffers and the stress builds up then that's going to make you more depressed and that's going to keep you even farther away from your friends and that's going to decrease the likelihood that you're gonna have enough positive emotion and enthusiasm to look for another job and then you know maybe you want to add a bit of a drinking problem to that just for fun and you can see
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that you can get a spiral going that's just taking you down right and there's all sorts of things because lots of times people conceptualize let's say you know you're unemployed guy and you go to counseling and you get a diagnosis of depression and the thing about a diagnosis of depression it's sort of like the assumption is there's something gone wrong with your psychological structure it's like if you're unemployed and you you're depressed it isn't obvious at all that the problem is in
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your head you know you know what I mean it's it doesn't it doesn't even obvious that it's a psychological problem it's just a problem and problems can take you out and so the you know if you're unemployed and you're under economic stress and your marriage is starting to shake and you're isolating yourself from your friends and you're less likely to be motivated to go look for a job you sort of think about that as a depressive spiral but you can also think of it as a
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conspiracy in some sense of external forces that are augering you into the ground and we don't tend to conceptualize psychological disorders that way but we should because lots of times when people are suffering from something that you could describe in Psychological terminology and depression is a very good example of that it isn't obvious that there's something wrong with them psychologically often they just are in trouble and there isn't a category in in psychological diagnosis
24:23
for client in serious trouble but my experience has been almost without exception that the people that come to see me come to see me because something's gone wrong with their life not because they have a psychological problem now you could say well there are psychological inadequacies such as they might be are interfering with their ability to recover or maybe even served as precursors to you know increase the probability of the catastrophe and so a well-functioning personality has all the
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micro routines in place that's actually something that you help people with if you're a behavioral therapist because one of the things you assume if you're a behavioral therapist is that sometimes the reason people aren't doing things is because they don't know how you know sometimes maybe the person is depressed but potentially high-functioning they got all the damn micro routines they're well socialized they're just dormant you got to get them awake again and
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implementing them but sometimes you get someone in your practice say who's just being neglected like you cannot believe right the parents never paid any attention to them or maybe just punished them every time they did something good that's really fun and then you know they didn't make friends and so they're really really big and and and poorly articulated and so then what you do is you work at the bottom of the micro routines and get them to practice building up all these little attributes
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that they didn't build up and you know one of the things you can think about in terms of character development is so now maybe understand something about your own personality you might say well what could you do to improve your personality and the answer is develop some of the micro routines on the other side of the personality distribution so if you're disagreeable as hell maybe you could start learning how to do nice things for people and that actually works by the
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way so if you take disagreeable people who are depressed and you get them doing nice things for other people their depression tends to lift but then by the same token if you're agreeable then you should practice doing some things for yourself and being more tough minded in your negotiations and so you can sort of place yourself on the on the personality trait distribution you know you're extrovert it's like okay man learn to spend some time with yourself right
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you're low in openness well try reading a book that's outside of your you know your your sphere of interest now and then if you're conscientious well you should probably learn how to relax occasionally and and so forth so you can I think partly what you're doing is you're developing your personality is not moving the mean much the average where you know where you're located but you're extending the standard deviation so that you're a bigger bag of tricks than you were before and I think you can
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practice that consciously it's like you're hyper orderly it's well get a dog you know dogs they're messy horrible things you know it's just what you need if you're hyper orderly because they're gonna leave hair everywhere and force you live with it and so okay so and so this is sort of you right this is your personality it's this connect collection of root subroutines that you've turned into a hierarchy and then there's something at the top of it and that's
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that's a big question like what the hell should be at the top of the hierarchy because that's the ultimate question of unity and then the the clinicians would say well it's the self-actualized person or it's the self or something like that you know that's that's the ID that's the implicit and perhaps explicit ideal that you're aiming for and you might say well is does such thing exists that I would say well do you admire people because that's your answer right do you despise
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people well you like some people and you don't like others you respect some people you don't respect others well you're acting out the notion that there's at least an implicit ideal you do the same thing when you go to movies you know you you know who the hero is you know who the bad guy is you're acting out the proposition that there's some sort of value hierarchy and there's some sort of manifestation of it that's coherent across time so you appear to believe that and you know you are driven
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at least to some degree by your own inner ideals and so you tend to answer the question is that real with an affirmative and if you don't there's catastrophic consequences Nietzsche and the existentialist we're very good at detailing maths like you let your value hierarchy disintegrate well then what well part of it is nihilistic chaos whoo that's not so much fun and then there's the alignment of nihilistic chaos with the intrinsic desire that someone will come
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along and tell you what to do right so what happens is if you let this devolve you end up with nihilistic exists not with nihilistic chaos or the demand for for the tyrant to come forward and we've had that happen lots of times and doesn't seem to have gone that well so all right well so what happens when you you lay out these little routines in the world at different levels of analysis well this is how your emotions function broadly speaking you know you're aiming at something and this is an
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oversimplification which is why I want to show you this right when I show you this assume that it's made out of that right it's just a schematic oversimplification because even if let's say that I'm trying to do something as simple as walking towards the door I mean that the action of walking towards the door is predicated on the existence of all the subroutines that enable me to propel my body across time and space and like there's that took a lot of internal
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organization to get that right it's a traumatized now and so you can treat it like it's invisible but implicit in any one of these structures is this entire structure and you actually see this in therapy very frequently - okay one of the things that I figured out over the last years is this is a good proposition so you know it's pretty self-evident that life is has got its rat's nest of miseries and that's for sure and maybe you could even make a categorical statement that life is mostly a rat's
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nest of misery you know you can make a pretty powerful argument for that but then there's a counter question which is well what if you tried not to make it any more miserable that had had to be right then what then what would it be like and my suspicions are is that law about misery I would suspect that most of that misery would go away because it's the unnecessary misery that really brings you down you know it's like well someone has cancer it's like that sucks
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but it's not like it's not like you can say if only we had done this differently then that wouldn't have happened but when someone's out like torturing you in a malevolent way or maybe you're doing the same you can always ask yourself well really it's this really necessary is this just like an useless add-on to the miseries of life that's what disheartens people and so even in your own life if if you if you aren't suffering from self-imposed misery and you're only suffering from an escapable
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misery maybe you could handle that and you know you could you could survive you could bear it and even maybe without becoming irredeemably corrupt and so the goal would be well yeah life is a rat's nest of miseries and maybe it has no ultimate meaning we could say that for feeling particularly pessimistic but it still leaves one question open which is if you didn't do everything you could to make it worse how good could you make it be and the least answer is well it it
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could be tragedy but maybe not hell and I think that's right I really believe that that's that's the most pessimistic proper statement the worst-case outcome in the worst of all possible worlds is that your life could be tragic but not hell and that's blood better than hell right it's it's and you think I could give you an example of the difference you're at your mother's deathbed well that's tragedy here's another scenario you're out your mother's deathbed and all you you and all your
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idiot siblings are arguing well that's the difference between tragedy and hell and you might be able to tolerate the first circumstance and maybe it would even bring you closer together with your family members the second one no one can bear that you walk away from a situation like that sick of yourself and sick of everything else - and you know it's often the case that tragic circumstances bring out the Dragons because the stress is high and all those things that people
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haven't dealt with they don't have the energy to repress and and all the bitterness comes pouring forward it's like seriously man so that's actually a good it's a rough lesson but it's a good hallmark for figuring out whether or not you're you've got yourself adjusted properly and in relationship to your siblings it's like if you all gathered around the bed of someone close who is dying could you manage it if they there is no it's like well put your life together because it's going to happen
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and you should be the person who's there that can do it and do it properly and then maybe you'd find that it isn't the sort of thing that will undermine your faith in life itself and I've seen I've seen both of those situations you know ugly ugly ugly situations you know murderously ugly situations and then their opposite where people have had terrible things happening to happen to them as a family and you know they pull together and they rebuild their damn
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ship and they sail away so that seems to me to be a lot better that makes you know when the flood comes right well okay so the same thing the question emerges well who are you well you could say your this plan that's what people usually that's how people usually identify maybe they have no plan at all and they're just in chaos right that's like being in the belly of the beast they're nihilistic and chaos they have no plan they're just chaos itself and that's a very dreadful situation for
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people to be in or maybe they conjure together a plan that's their identity it's kind of fragile and they're holding on to that with with everything they've got it's their little stick of wood that they're floating in the ocean clinging to you know and so they're identifying really hard with that plan that's what happens when you're an ideologue is that you're identifying really hard with that plan the problem is is something comes up to confront it well how do you act
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well you can't let go with a plan because you drown then you cling to it rigidly well that's no good because then you can't learn anything then if that's you you're a totalitarian you're not going to learn anything you're going to end up in something that's close enough to hell so that you won't know the difference and you might drag everyone along with you that's happened plenty of times right it's the whole story of the 20th century it happened over and over and over and it happens in people's
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states it's happens in their business organizations that happens in their cities that happens in their provinces it happens in their States and it happens in their psyches all at the same time you can't blame the manifestation of that sort of thing on any of those one levels it happens when a society goes down that way it goes down everywhere at the same time it's not the totalitarians at the top and all the happy people striving to be at the bottom it's not that at all it's
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totalitarianism at every single level of the hierarchy including the psychological and so you don't want to be the thing you don't want to be in chaos that's for sure but you don't want to be the thing that clings so desperately to the raft that you can't let go when someone comes to rescue you right you don't want to be that so then you think well exactly what are you you know what the chaos you know what the plan maybe your the thing that confronts the obstacle and I would say
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that's the categorical lesson of of psychology insofar as it has to do with personal transformation that's what you always teach people in psychotherapy I don't care what sort of psychotherapists you are you're always teaching them the same thing you're the thing that can you not you're not the plan you're the thing that can confront the obstacle to the plant and then when you know even further that the obstacle is not only an obstacle but opportunity itself well
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then your whole view of the world can change because you might think well I've got this plan something came up to object to it it's like it's possible that the thing that's objecting has something to teach you that will take you to the place where you develop an even better plant that's a nice framework to use it's like are you so sure that this is a problem is that the only way that you can look at it or is it an opportunity I mean I'm not trying to be you know naively optimistic there
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are some things that's pretty hard to extract gold from some dragons and maybe the death of a family member is a good example of that but in even in a situation like that I can tell you that it's an opportunity for it's an opportunity for maturation that's for sure and the thing is you might say well it's pretty miserable to go to be digging for gold when someone's falling into the grave well if they really loved you first of all that's what they'll want you to do and second
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you're gonna make their death a lot more palatable experience for them if you're someone who can be in the room and be helpful instead of be you know quivering in the corner and feeling that the entire world is collapsing in on you I mean that's another you want to be the useful person at the funeral how's that for a goal that's a good goal man you know that you've got yourself together in a situation like that because you're gonna be at them and maybe you want to
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be the person on whose shoulder people cry that'd be a good goal that's kind of you know I don't like being I evilly optimistic so when I tell you to get your life together I'm not going to say roses and sunshine it's like that's that's that's that's pablum for fools but it really is something to be the reliable person out of funeral there's this idea in union psychology called the circumambulation and you only had this idea that you had a potential future self which would be in potential
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everything that you could be and that it manifests itself moment to moment in your present life by making you interested in things and the things that you're interested in are the things that would guide you along the path that would lead you to maximal development now it sounds up like a metaphysical idea or a or a mystical idea even but but it's not it's it's not it's a really profoundly biological idea the idea is something like well you're set up so that you're automatically interested in
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those things that was fully expand you as a well adapted creature well like there's nothing radical about that idea how well what else could possibly be the case unless there's something fundamentally flawed about you that is what the situation would be it's kind of interesting to think about how that would be manifest moment to moment but the idea is something like well your interest is captured by those things that lead you down the path of development well I better be the case
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okay so that's fine and so there's some utility and pursuing those things that you're interested in that's the call to adventure let's say so and the call to adventure takes you all sorts of places now the problem with the call to adventure is like what the hell do you know you might be interested in things that are kind of warped and bent and often it's the case that when new parts of people manifest themselves and grip their interest say they do it very badly
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and shoddily and so you stumble around like an idiot when you try to do something new that's where the fool is the precursor to the savior from the from the symbolic perspectives because you have to be a fool before you can be a master and if you're not willing to be a fool then you can't be a master so so you're gonna it's an error error ridden process and that's also laid out in the Old Testament stories but the first thing that happens to all these patriarchal figures when God kicks
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them out of their father's house when they're like 84 is that they they run into all sorts of trouble and some of its social and some of its natural and some of it's a consequence of their own moral inadequacy so they're fools and but but the thing that's so interesting is that despite the fact that they're fools they're still supposed to go on the adventure and that they're capable of learning enough as a consequence of moving forward on the adventure so that
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they straighten themselves out across time and so it's something like this this circumambulation that young talked about was this continual will return to this this continual circling in some sense of who you could be you might notice for example that there are themes in your life you know when you go back across your experiences you see you kind of have your typical experience that sort of repeats itself and there might be variation on it like a musical theme but it's it's like you're circling
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yourself and getting closer to yourself as you move across time that's the circumambulation now you remember that for a sec cause we'll go back to it okay so imagine that something glimmers before you it's an an interest that's dawning and you decide well first of all you're paralyzed do you think well how do I know if I should pursue that it's probably a stupid idea and the proper response to that is you're right it probably is a stupid idea because almost all all ideas are
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stupid and so the probability that as you move forward on your adventure that you're gonna get it right the first time is zero it's just not gonna happen and so then you might think well maybe I'll just wait around until I get the right idea and which people do right so they're like 40 year old thirteen year olds which is not a good idea so they wait around until it's waiting for godot until they finally got it right but the problem is you're too stupid to know
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when you've got it right so waiting around isn't gonna help because even if it the perfect opportunity manifested itself to you in your incomplete form the probability that you would recognize it as the perfect opportunity is zero you might even think it's the worst possible idea that you've ever heard of anywhere highly likely highly likely so so you have there's niche Nietzsche called that a will will to stupidity which I really liked so because he thought of stupidity as being
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it you know it's it's you have to take it into account fundamentally and work with it and so and so you can take these tentative steps on your pathway to destiny and you can assume that you're gonna do it badly and that's really useful because you don't have to beat yourself up it's pretty easy to do it badly but the thing is it's way better to do it badly than not to do it at all and that's a continual message that echoes through these historical stories in Genesis it's like these are flawed
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people they should have got the hell out of their house way before they did and they go out and they stumble around in tyranny and famine and self betrayal and and violence and but it's a hell of a lot better than just rotting away at home and that's the that's great so that's good and so why is that well okay so you you start your path and you think that you're heading you know towards your star and so you go in that direction and then because you're here the world looks a particular way but
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then when you move here the world looks different and you're different as a consequence of having made that voyage and so what that means is that now that thing that glimmers in front of you is going to have shifted its location because you weren't very good at specifying it to begin with and now that you're a little sharper and more focused than you were it's it's going to reveal itself with more accuracy to you and so then you have to take you know it's almost like 180 degree reversal but it
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isn't because you know you've I mean you've gone this far and that's a long ways to get that far but that's a lot farther than you would be if you just stayed where you were waiting and so it doesn't matter that you overshoot continually because as you overshoot even if you don't learn what you should have done you're going to continually learn what you shouldn't keep doing and if you learn enough about what you shouldn't keep do then that's tantamount at some point to
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learning at the same time what you should be doing so it's okay so it's like this now what's cool about it though I think is that as you progress the degree of overshooting starts to decline right and that we know that there's nothing hypothetical about that as you learn a new skill like even to play it play a song on the piano for example you over shoot madly he's making all sorts of mistakes to begin with and then the mistakes they disappear there's a great TED talk I think it was about
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this guy set up a really advanced computational recording system in his home and recorded every single utterance his young child made while learning to speak and then he put together the child's attempts to say certain phonemes and put them in the list and you can hear the child deviating madly to begin with and then after hundreds and hundreds of repetitions just zeroing right in on the exact phoneme so you know I you might not know this but when kids babble because they start babbling
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when they're quite young they babble every human phoneme including all sorts of phonemes that adults can't say and then they they die into their language so that after they learn say English then there's all sorts of phonemes they can no longer hear or pronounce but to begin with it's all there which is really quite interesting but so they see as they learn a particular language they zero in on the proper way to pronounce that and their errors minimize and every
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time you learn something that's how it is and that's really useful to know too because it means that it's okay to wander around stupidly before you fix your destination now you see that echoed in Exodus right because what happens is that the Egyptians or the Hebrews escaped a tyranny which is kind of whatever you do personally and psychologically when you escape from your previous set of stupidly held and ignorant and stubborn axioms it's like away from that tyranny it's like great i
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freed myself from that well then what well you think well now I'm on the way it's no you're not now you're in the desert where you wander around stupidly you know and worship the wrong things until you finally organize yourself morally again and head in the proper direction so that's worth knowing too because you think well I got rid of a lot of things baggage excess baggage that I didn't need in my life and now everything's okay it's like no it's not you've got
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rid of a whole set of scaffolds that were keeping you in place even though they were pathological and now you have nothing and nothing actually turns out to be better than something pathological but you you're still stuck with the problem of nothing and and that's well that's exactly why Exodus is structured the way that it is it's that you escape from eternity it's hooray we're no longer slaves yeah well now you're nihilistic and lost it's not necessarily an improvement but it is but it is the
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pre let's see it's also useful to know that because you can also be deluded into the idea that imagine that you're trying to become enlightened which might mean to turn all those parts of you on that could be turned on you think well that's just a linear pathway uphill you know it's just from one success to another it's no it's not it's like here you are and you're not doing too badly and the first step is a complete bloody catastrophe it's worse and then maybe
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you can pull yourself together and you hit a new plateau and then that crumbles and shakes and bang it's worse again and so because part of the reason that people don't become enlightened is because it's punctuated by intermittent deserts essentially by intermittent catastrophes and if you don't know that well then you're basically screwed because you go ahead on your movement forward and you collapse and you think well that didn't work I collapsed it's like no that's par for the course it's
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not indication that you failed it's just indication that it's really hard and that when you learn something you also unlearn something and the thing you unlearned is probably useful and unlearning it actually is painful you know let's say if you have to get out of a bad relationship it's like not every not any really there isn't any relationship that's a hundred percent bad and so when you jump out of it well maybe you're in better shape but you're still lonesome and disoriented you don't
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know what your past was and you don't know what your present is and you don't know what your future is it's that's not that's why people a with the devil they know instead of you know looking for the devil they don't know so so anyways the fact that you're full of faults doesn't mean you have to stop and thank God for that that's a really useful thing and the fact that you're full of faults doesn't mean that you can't learn and so you can pause it an ideal and you're gonna be
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wrong about it but it doesn't matter because what you're right about is positing the ideal moving towards it if the actual ideal isn't conceptualize perfectly well first surprise surprise cuz like what are you going to do that's perfect so it doesn't matter that it's imperfect imperfect it just matters that you do it and that you move forward so that's really that's really positive news as far as I'm concerned because you can actually do that right you can do it
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badly anyone can do that so that's that's useful okay so like if you're an efficient person you would have just done that but you're not but who cares you know you still end up in the in the same place and maybe the trip is even more interesting who knows probably - interesting
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