so I think the best way to continue to
walk you through the thinkers that we're planning to cover is to do that with
examples they stick better and they're more interesting and it's very difficult
to understand you outside of a narrative context and so I'm going to walk you
through the Lion King today how many of you have seen the Lion King yes
so how many of you haven't right okay so so you obviously were raised in a box
somewhere out in the middle of field so anyways you know it's it's it's an
amazingly popular animated movie I think it was the most highest grossing
animated movie ever made made until frozen which I actually absolutely
detested but the Lion King The Lion King is actually consciously influenced by
archetypes as well as unconsciously influenced by them so it's a bit of a
cheat I would say in some sense but it doesn't I don't for the purposes that
we're using it for I think it's just fine and so partly what you might think
about is that it's its relationship to archetypal themes that made it so
overwhelmingly popular it's same being the case with say books and movies like
Harry Potter or the entire Marvel series the Marvel series is quite interesting I
know somebody who wrote for Batman and for Wolverine I know Batman he's into
Marvel comic but one of the things that he told me that was quite interesting
was that once these characters take off and establish a life of their own they
have a backstory and which becomes part of the mythology that's collectively
held by the readers and if you you can invent an alternative universe where you
can muck about with the backstory but otherwise you better stick with it or
the readers are gonna write you and tell you that you've got the story wrong and
so there's a bit of a collaboration between the writers and the readers
after these things take on a life of their own and so and of course the they
they tend to the the comic books in particular tend to tend towards
mythological themes very very rapidly and so anyways Carl Jung was a
fascinating person I think you can read his biography autobiography
/ biography which is called memories dreams and reflections which in many
ways I think is an unfortunate book because it's usually the only book that
people read that's that is more or less by young but and it is more popular yet
popularly accessible which is probably a good thing but it's also it's not as
rigorous as his other books and so the problem with someone like Jung is you
kind of have to read him as much as you can in the original because interpreting
him is not a very straightforward matter he was a very visionary person by which
I mean he had an incredible visual imagination and he used that a lot he
used it in his therapy practice I believe that most of his therapy clients
were high in trade openness I have a lot of clients who are high in trade
openness they kind of seek me out because I'm high and trade openness and
you know they watch my videos and that sort of thing and they're interested in
what I'm doing and many of them are astute dreamers and prolific dreamers
and many open people in my experience have archetypal dreams whereas people
who are lower in openness they either don't dream at all or they don't
remember their dreams as much or they're not interested in them and they're not
interested in the mythological underpinnings of them so I've taught
psychology roughly speaking to many different types of people including
lawyers and lawyers and physicians and they tend to be higher in trade
conscientiousness than in openness and they're much more interested in the
practical applications of psychology and maybe the big five theories than they
are in the narrative underpinnings and you know people say that when they went
to um-- they had union dreams but I don't and then when they went to Freud
they had Freudian dreams and I don't really believe that's exactly true I
think it was a matter of selection bias a priori selection bias on the part of
the people who were likely to go see either of those two and so but I've been
struck by some clients in particular how unbelievably continually they can
generate deep archetypal dreams with a really coherent narrative structure it's
really phenomenal and how revealing those dreams our problem with archetypal
dreams is that they're not really personal right so if you're looking for
a personal way out of a situation an archetypal dream doesn't help you that
much because it gives you the general pattern rather
than a specific solution to your problem but a good dream will do both at once
anyways yung was an astute student of Freud's I will cover Freud next although
generally and in personality courses the the order is reversed Freud first
menuing because of their temporal of the temporal order of their thought but I
think it's better to start with Jung because it's it's as if you Freud
excavated into the basement and then Jung excavated into many many floors
underneath the basement of the mind and so from if you're transitioning from an
archaic understanding of archaic modes of thinking towards Freud it's better to
go through young because Jung is I think I think Freudian theory is a subset of
Jungian Theory fundamentally just like Newtonian physics is a subset of
Einstein Ian's physics and I think that Freud knew that even to some degree
although he was very much opposed to any sort of religious thinking or
mythological religious thinking I would say he was a real 19th century
materialist and he didn't like the fact that Jung's work started to delve into
religious themes in a manner that actually in some sense validated those
themes and so that's actually why they split they split when you published a
book called symbols of transformation Jung was also a deep student of
Nietzsche Nietzsche wrote a book called thus spake Zarathustra which is kind of
an Old Testament revelation poetry kind of book it's a strange one and I
wouldn't recommend if you want to read Nietzsche that you start with that one
but most people do but you get a seminar on thus spake Zarathustra which is about
I've got this wrong it's somewhere between 700 and 1100 pages long and it
only covers the first third of the book and thus spake Zarathustra is actually
quite a short book and so well so you can imagine how much you had to know
about Nietzsche to derive that many words out of that few words and
Nietzsche was a well an absolute absolute genius and Jung was actually
trying to answer the question that Nietzsche posed fundamentally which is
why part of the reason why it's incorrect historically to consider him a
Freudian he was so nietzsche basically stated let's say explicitly that
scientific empiricism / rationalist had resulted in the death of the
mythological tradition of the west roughly speaking that's Nietzsche's
comment on the death of God and in that comment he also said that the fact that
God was dead was going to produce tremendous idiy a tional and social
historical upheavals that would result in the deaths of millions of people that
that he didn't say all that in one place it's it's spread between part of its in
will to power and and I can't remember the source of the other one some of its
referenced and thus spake Zarathustra but Nietzsche believed that in order to
overcome the collapse of traditional values with the idea say of God as its
cornerstone people would have to become creatures that could produce their own
values as a replacement that we would have to become capable of generating
autonomous values and Jung but but that's easier said than done because
trying to impose a set of values on yourself is very difficult because
you're not very cooperative and you know that if you try to get yourself to do
something that you don't want to do or that's hard you just won't do it and so
it's not like you can just invent your own values and then go along with that
that just doesn't work and so what Jung and the Freudians did Freud first I
would say was to start looking to be looking into people's fantasies
autonomous fantasies unconscious fantasies to see if they could - and and
discover that values bubbled up of their own accord into those fantasies and you
can imagine for example if you've become enamored of someone that you might start
fantasizing about them and if you read off the fantasy then you can tell what
you're after and what you're up to and so the motivational force composes the
fantasy and Freud was more interested not in a personal sense so in in so far
as your fantasies might reveal your personal history so for example if you
have a burst of negative emotion in the clinical session there'll be a fantasy
that goes along with that an association of ideas that that that kind of manifest
themselves of their own accord and they're not necessarily coherent and
logical they're linked by emotion that's the free association technique in
Freudian psychology and they also might manifest themselves in dreams and
fantasies and so Freud started doing the analysis of these spontaneous let's call
them fantasies and Jung link that more at Freud did this first with the oedipal
oedipal complex but then you linked up
spontaneous fantasies and dreams with with myth mythology and fantasy across
history and of course Piaget did the same thing from a completely different
standpoint so and that a lot of that's embedded in this movie so we might as
well just walk through it so the first question might be well why is a lion a
king right and because it makes sense to people that a lion could be a king and
of course a lion is an apex predator and so which means it's at the top of the
food chain roughly speaking and it's sort of golden like the Sun so that's
also useful and you know it has that Mane that makes it look majestic and of
course it's very physically powerful and it's it's and and and it's intimidating
and so it's something that you run away from as well right or you're awestruck
by so the fact that you know it's like snail king just doesn't make any sense
right but lion king that works and and you got to think about those things
because it's not self-evident why a lion would work as a king but uh but a snail
wouldn't but it fits in with the your metaphorical understanding of the way
the world works much better and so the Lion King makes sense and well and when
things like that that aren't rationally self-evident makes sense you have to ask
yourself in what metaphorical context do they make sense so you have the Lion
King now the movie opens with a sunrise and the sunrise is equivalent to the
dawn of consciousness so that in many archaic stories the Sun was a hero like
Horus if I remember correctly was a solar king but but Apollo in particular
but Apollo Greek Greek myth the idea was that at the Sun was this was the the
hero the hero who illuminated the sky in the day and so heroism and illumination
and enlightenment are all tangled together metaphorically and then at
night what would happen would be that Sun would fight with the with the dragon
of darkness basically or with evil all night and then rise again victorious in
the morning and so it's a death and rebirth theme and it's very very very
very common mythological theme and the reason the Sun is associated with
consciousness as far as I can tell is that were not nocturnal creatures right
we're awake during the day and we're very very visual half our brain is
devoted to visual processing and to be lightened and illuminated means to
develop to move towards a higher state of consciousness and we naturally use
light symbolism to to represent that you know like the light bulb on the top of
someone's head you know you don't say I was in darkened when you learn something
new and so again that fits into this underlying metaphorical substrate that
that's I think deeply biologically grounded but but also social or socially
grounded so it's a new day it's the start of a new day and a day day
actually means like French your name means day the day trek in some sense and
how to comport yourself during the day is the fundamental question the day is
the canonical unit of time and so you have to know how to comport yourself
during the day and part of that is a journey from consciousness into
unconsciousness and that's and that return so like Apollo you you've you
descend into unconsciousness and then re-emerge and of course that's not
metaphorical at all that's exactly what you do you descend into the underworld
of darkness and dreams and strange things happen down there and so and then
you awake if you're fortunate or unfortunate depending on your state of
mind you awake in the morning and it's a new day right and so the dream world
seems to help you sort out your thoughts by the way if you keep people awake for
an extended period of time then they they they they lose their minds
essentially the dream that the unconsciousness and the dream state seem
absolutely critical in the maintenance of mental health although people don't
exactly understand why it looks like dreams might help you forget because
forgetting is really important you just can't really wait you just can't
remember everything that happened to you gets today I'm cluttered that that you
you'd fall apart and so you reduce things to the gist and when you're doing
that you pack them in it's like you compress them in some sense you pack
them into a smaller space and get rid of everything that isn't relevant and the
dream seems to not be part of that it also seems to be a place where you
deeply encode learning that might have been done that day which is something
that Freud actually noted in his interpretation of dreams which is a
great book if you're ever gonna read a book that Freud wrote the interpretation
of Dreams is the proper one to read in my estimation it's a brilliant book and
it laid the groundwork for a lot of what Jung did and so anyways that's how the
movie starts and the animals come out in to the light and that's that's a
metaphor for the dawning of consciousness to come out into the light
where you can see and so this is a baby giraffe and babies emerge into the light
roughly speaking and that's that's like I said that that's a representation of
the emergence or expansion of consciousness and so this is how the
movie starts it starts a very expansive music as well
celebratory music and that's to indicate to you to set the tone for the movie but
also to indicate to you that you're about to watch something of import and
the opening scene is actually a real scene of genius in my estimation the
animators did a great job and it goes along very nicely with the music and so
you see this little a sand then you see this rock Pride Rock I believe it's
called and in the middle of it and it's the center it's the center it's like the
spot that's marked by a cathedral which is an X or a cross and you're right in
the middle of that and so it's the center of the light that's another way
of thinking about it or it's the center of the territory or it's the home or
it's the fire in the in the wilderness or it's the tree in the center where you
live it's all of those things at once it's inhabited territory with you at the
center and the rock represents tradition because people tend to inscribe their
traditions on rock right or to build them into rock like the pyramid so you
could think about that as a pyramid as an Egyptian pyramid and it's the right
way to think about it you could also think about it as a
dominance hierarchy with the apex predator at the top and that's the lion
so it makes sense that the lion would be in the light on the rock that's a
pyramid in the middle of the territory right that makes sense to people
psychologically so because that's what the state is the state is a hierarchy
with with something at the top that occupies a space that has been
illuminated and made safe by consciousness that's what the state is
and that's all represented right away in this movie and all the animals come to
to observe what's happening in the pyramid and at the top because they need
to know what happens at the top partly to organize their world that's
the pyramid but also to see how the organizational principle works and
that's why they're all gathering and so they're gathering in the light in the
morning to observe something new that's going to be born that's of significant
importance and that's the birth of the hero and this little bird here Zazu
right the zoo is like Horus the Egyptian God
who was a Falken and an I at the same time he is the Kings I in this Kings
eyes in this movie right he flies up above outside of the pyramid so he can
see everything that goes on and reports to the King and so partly what that
indicates is that the thing that's at the top of the pyramid needs to be an
eye and that's partly why you see an eye on the top of the pyramid on the back of
the American dollar bill it's exactly the same idea or if you look at the
Washington Monument which is a pyramid at the top you see that it's capped with
aluminum and you think well why aluminum and the answer to that was it was the
most expensive metal at that time and so the notion is is that at the top of the
pyramid there's something that actually doesn't belong in the pyramid it's
something that goes up above the pyramid and can see everything and so you could
think about it this way is that you're gonna be in a lot of pyramids in your
life dominance hierarchies and different states and families and all of that and
they'll arrange themselves into a hierarchy and there'll be something at
the top and the top is the thing that can do well across hierarchies so it's
not stuck in any one pyramid it and it's partly associated with vision and the
ability to see a long long distance also to see what you don't want to see and to
report that back to the king and so the king fundamentally as far as you guys
are concerned from a psychological perspective that's your super-ego
that's the Freudian perspective or it might be the moral system by which you
comport yourself but your eyes are the thing that updates that right you need
it to orient yourself in the world you need it to orient yourself among other
people but your eye and your capacity to pay attention especially to what you
don't want to pay attention to is the thing that continually updates that
model exactly as Piaget laid out with children so and all of that's packed
into the imagery in the first you know a few minutes of this movie and that's
actually why it relies on imagery why this isn't just a lecture by a
psychologist you know when you go to see the movie it's because the images they
say a picture is worth a thousand words but and there's thousands of pictures in
this movie obviously but maybe a picture is worth more words than you can
actually use to describe it if the pictures is is profound enough and we
have many many pictures like that any deeply symbolic picture
is virtually inexhaustible in terms of its of semantically with regards to its
explanation images are very very dense so anyways the animals all gather now
the animals are also in representations from the Freudian perspective and the it
is the part of your psyche from the Freudian perspective that's animalistic
and and and full of of implicit drives sexual and aggressive in particular as
far as Freud was concerned and that's because those two drives say unlike
thirst or hunger are much more difficult to integrate into proper social being
and tend to be excluded and left unconscious and so a lot of Freudian
psychology and I would say psychology in general is focused on the integration of
sexual impulses and aggressive impulses into the psyche I would also add to that
anxiety because anxiety is also a major problem anxiety and negative emotion
that's pain like is also a major problem for people and so the animals represent
those it'd like impulses that have to be organized hierarchically before you can
become an integrated being and precisely the piagetian manner right because
Piaget would say well the child comes into the world with reflexes and maybe a
more modern psychologists would also concentrate on the implicit motivations
and those have to be organized inside the child into some kind of hierarchy of
unity before the child can organize him or herself into the broader unity of the
state and that's basically what's being represented here and so so Zazu the eyes
of the king comes to check out the King and that's uh what's his name what's the
King's name Mufasa yeah and he's a very regal looking person lion and he stands
up straight and tall and that means that he's high in serotonin because serotonin
governs posterior flexion and if so if your dominant and near the top of
hierarchies you tend to expand so that you look bigger than then you could if
you shrunk down and so if you're low dominant person you wander around like
this so that you look small and weak and you don't pose a threat to anybody but
if you're at the top you expand yourself so that you can command the space and
that's why he has that particular kind of regal posture and if you look at his
facial expression you see that it's quite severe it like he's he's capable
of kindness but he's also harsh and judgmental and that's what
society is like that's what the super-ego is like and what that means is
that he's integrated his aggression and I've seen this happen in my clinical
clients when they come in and they're too agreeable they look like Simba looks
later in the movie when he's an adolescent and he's sort of like a deer
in headlights everything is coming in and nothing is coming out but when the
person integrates their shadow and gets the aggressive part of themselves
integrated into their personality their face is hardened and if you look at
people you can tell because the people who are too agreeable look childlike and
innocent and the people who well a hyper aggressive person will look you know
mean and cruel but uh let's see if that's good that's still working so but
I've seen people's face changes change face change in the course of therapy men
and women so and what happens is they start to look more mature and it's it's
more like they're they're judging the world as well as interacting with it
properly once they integrate that more disagreeable part of them it's very very
necessary that's part of the incorporation of the Union shadow or the
incorporation of the unconscious from a Freudian perspective but old Musa Musa
there he's already got that he's already got that covered so and he's capable of
obviously he can smile and he's full capable of the full range of expressions
but he's a tough looking character and and now this baboon here who's supposed
to be basically just a fool when the story was first written he turned into
what's essentially a shaman across time and so he represents the self from the
Union perspective now the self is everything you could be across time so
you imagine that there's you and there's the potential inside you whatever that
is you know and potential is an interesting idea because it's represents
something that isn't yet real yet we act like it's real because people will say
to you you should live up to your potential and that potential is partly
what you could be if you interacted with the world in a manner that would gain
you the most information right because you build yourself out of the
information in the piagetian sense but it's deeper than that - because we know
that if you take yourself and you put yourself in a new environment new genes
turn on in your nervous system they encode for new proteins and so you're
full of biological tential that won't be realized unless
you move yourself around in the world in two different challenging circumstances
and that'll turn on different circuits so it's not merely that you're
incorporating information from the outside world in the constructivist
sense it's that by exposing yourself to different environments you put different
physiological demands on on yourself all the way down to the genetic level and
that manifests new elements of you and so one of the things that happens to
people and this is a very common cultural notion is that you should go on
a pilgrimage at some point to somewhere central and that would be say like the
rock in the Pride Rock and the Lion King because you take yourself out of your
dopey little village and that's just a little bounded you that everyone knows
and that isn't very expanded and then you go somewhere dark and dangerous to
the central place and while you do that you have adventures and they tough on
you and pull more out of you like partly because you're becoming informed which
means in formation it means you're becoming more organized at every level
of analysis but there's also more of you too and so that's a very classic idea
and then in in cathedrals in Europe especially at Chartres there's a big
maze on the floor a circular maze which is a symbolic representation of the
pilgrimage for people who couldn't do it and so it's a huge circle divided into
quadrants which is a union Mandela and you enter the maze at one point and then
you have to walk through the entire maze north east west and south before you get
to the center and the center is symbolized by a flower that's carved in
stone it looks like this it's big this maze a it's it's large so that you can
walk it and that's a symbolic pilgrimage it takes you to the center that's the
center of the cross because it's in a Cathedral and that's the point of
acceptance of voluntary suffering that's what that means and so you walk through
you can call that a circumambulation you go to all the corners of the world to
find yourself and so well the self is the baboon in this particular in this
piece of mandrill actually in this particular representation and he lives
in the tree he lives in the tree of life it's a bale bob tree in this particular
so he's the spirit that inhabits the tree of life and he's the eternal wise
man that's a way of thinking so is the king but
he's sort of a superordinate king or an outside king in some sense he's the
repository of ancient wisdom and the king is the manner in which that wisdom
is currently being acted out in the world and so they're friends and that
means that the king is a good king because if they if the king was a bad
King he would be alienated from himself and that would make him shallow and
one-dimensional and that would make him a bad ruler no Union with the traditions
of the past to be a good ruler you have to rescue your father from the
underworld and integrate that and of course that's a main theme in this
entire movie so hey a new mystery to solve okay so the hero is born and that's what
the Rising Sun represents and everybody goes oh oh isn't that cute and the
reason for that is because you're biologically wired especially if you're
agreeable to respond with caretaking activity - cute - cuteness and cuteness
button nose big eyes small mouths round head symmetry and helpless movements and
you'll respond to that across the entire class of mammalian of mammalian
creatures even maybe down to lizards you know isn't that cute it's no it's a
lizard but you know so so so that's an archetype as well that's the archetype
of the vulnerable hero at Bohr the vulnerable hero newly born and that
should invoke a desire mostly on the part of males to encourage and mostly on
the part of females to nur it to nurture but males and females are quite cross
wired among human beings and so there's encouragement from the women and there's
also nurturing from the men and of course those those curves in some sense
overlap so there's more nurturing males and more encouraging females but that's
roughly the archetype and so he looks cute and everybody goes on and that's
because the animators nailed that they caught the essential features of
cuteness and he's also in the light right and so then the shaman mandrel
basically baptizes him nots essentially what he's doing and he uses something
that symbolic of the Sun which is this ripe fruit and fruits are symbolic of
the Sun because of course they need the Sun to ripen and they're round like the
Sun and so and people know that they need light but and and so anyways the
animators make a relationship between the fruit that the shaman is going to
break and the Sun and so he's also being baptized into the Sun and that means
that he's being baptized into the light or that he's being transformed into a
hero and so then everyone's happy and that's basically you know the divine
father and the divine mother and the divine son and the self who's taking
care of that and there's a union between the baby and the wise old man because
the baby is all the potential that's realized in the self and there's an old
idea that the way to full maturity is to find what you lost as a child and regain
it it's a brilliant idea and that that that echoes through mists all
over the world and that means you have to regain your capacity once you're
disciplined and you know how to do something you have to regain your
capacity for play and sort of for wide-eyed wonder and that's maybe the
childlike part of your spirit and the reintegration of that childlike part
with the adult grown-up part Reviva Faiz the adult grown-up part and allows the
child to manifest itself in a disciplined way in the world and so
that's all being hinted that there and then they showed the shaman shows the
baby the newborn hero to the crowd and it's very cool what happens in the movie
all the animals spontaneously Neil and I can give you an example of that kind of
spontaneous action in a crowd it's imagine you're watching off
gymnastics performance right and and it's like at a high level world-class
performance and someone comes out there and they do this routine that's just
dead letter-perfect you know and they stop and everybody claps like mad right
and it's perfect and so then the next contestant comes
out and they're basically in real trouble because you know this person
just got nine point seven out of ten and it was perfect so how do you beat
perfect and so will they come out there and then you watch them and you're right
on the edge of your seat because what you see them do is something
extraordinarily disciplined just like the last person did but they push
themselves into that zone that's just beyond their discipline capacity and you
can tell every second you're watching it that they're that close to disaster and
so you're right on the edge of your seat and and you know that they're doing a
high-wire act without a net and so when they finally land triumphantly you'll
all stand up and clap spontaneously and it's because you've just witnessed
someone who's a master at playing a game who's also a master at improving how to
play that game at the same time and people love that more than anything to
see that it's just absolutely overwhelming because it's a testament to
the human spirit and you'll respond automatically and unconsciously to that
and that's why that's an analogy to why the animals all spontaneously bow when
now what happens is they shows the Lion King and the Sun breaks and shines on
that the hero at the same time so there's this concordance between an
earthly event and a so-called heavenly event and you would call that
synchronous that's his idea of synchronicity where
something important subjectively is also signified by something that appears in
narrative keeping with that in the outside world that's one of the most
controversial elements of his theory but I've experienced a variety of
synchronous events and they often happen in therapy especially around dreams but
they're very hard to communicate because they're so specific to the context in
which it occurs they're very difficult to explain so anyways it's the
synchronous event that make drops all the animals to their knees so there's
the Sun coming out and there's shining on them and all the primates go mad for
that and that's of course exactly what we do when we applaud and then we switch
to scar now scar is mufasa's brother evil brother the king always has an evil
brother and so does the hero the hero always has an adversary and the reason
for that is the king always has an evil brother and that means that the state
always has a tyrannical element and the tyrannical element exists for two
reasons one is the state deteriorate of its own accord and that's an entropy
observation what that means is that the state is a construction of the past
right but the present isn't the same as the past and to the degree that the past
is mismatched with the demands of the present then it's then it's then it's a
tyrannical it's malfunctioning and so it's it's a continual problem with the
state it's always two steps behind the environment and so then that means that
the awareness of living people has to update the state and so Eliot and Maria
Eliot who's a great historian of religions looked at flood stories from
all over the world because there are flood stories from all over the world
partly because there are floods all over the world but that's there's a
psychological reason to so imagine that New Orleans was wiped out by a hurricane
right a flood didn't you say well that was an act of God but then you think
wait a second wait a second they knew those dam dykes weren't gonna hold they
knew they weren't built strong enough they took the money that was allocated
to the dikes and spent it badly and that was willful blindness and so you could
say that it was God who caused the flood so to speak metaphorically but you could
also say that it was the degeneration of the state and the willful blindness of
the politicians that call the flood in Holland they build the
dikes to withstand the worst storm in 10,000 years in the you southern US they
built them to withstand the worst storm in a hundred years and they knew that
that was insufficient and so the flood if there's a flood well you can say well
that's an act of nature but you can also say just wait a sec maybe if there was a
flood because we looked the other way and because our systems were out of date
and that's why in flood stories there's there's a continual theme which is the
the people get wiped out by the flood because God judges them harshly for
their senility and their willful blindness and it's a story that's very
much you'll have a flood in your life right it'll be a flood of chaos and
you'll find of one form another and you'll find when you investigate the
causes of the flood that some of it will be and sometimes this is cake the case
it's just random you just got singled out you got a
terrible disease and that's the end of you or something like that but there'll
be other situations where the flood comes and you're surrounded by chaos and
you'll look into it you'll think I knew this was coming I knew I wasn't paying
attention I knew I hadn't sorted things out and the consequences of that will
have cascaded and wiped you out and then you're in real trouble because not only
did you get wiped out but you also know it's your fault and that is not a good
thing that makes you bitter and resentful and murderous when that
happens so anyways scar is scarred right so what that implies is he's had a
pretty rough life and he's kind of skinny and he said he was born in the
low end of the gene pool and so he has reasons to be resentful
he's also hyper intelligent and rational and it's one of the things you see very
commonly about the evil adversary of the state or of the individuals often
intelligent and hyper rational and the best commentator on that was probably
John Milton and Paradise Lost because that's how he represents Lucifer or
Satan who's the spirit of rationality and enlightenment strangely enough hence
Lucifer the bringer of light and the reason for that as far as I can tell and
this is something that Milton figured out when he compiled all these ancient
stories about evil and tried to make them coherent was that the problem with
irrationality with rationality is that it tends to fall in love with its own
product right and so then it comes up with a
theory that makes that a totality and then it won't let go so the rational
mind has a totalitarian element and we know that to some degree because that
kind of rationality seems more left hemisphere focused and the left
hemisphere tends to impose structured order on the world and be updated by the
right hemisphere and the right hemisphere generally updates it with
negative information and with fantasy and so the left hemisphere will impose a
coherent structure on the world which is really necessary for you live in it but
the problem is there's a tension between coherence and completeness and that's
partly why you need two hemispheres you need one to represent the world and you
need one to keep track of the exceptions and to feed those slowly into the
representational system so that it so that it can stay updated without
collapsing into complete chaos so anyways scar and he's got this like
droopy mouth and this whiny arrogant voice and he feels hard done by and he's
resentful and and in in classic heroes stories stories of the state as well the
so this is an Egyptian take on it Osiris was was the god of the state and set who
later became Satan that name became Satan as it transformed through Coptic
Christianity Osiris had a brother named set and set he didn't pay attention to
set enough attention and set was always scheme scheming to overthrow the kingdom
just like scar is and the Egyptian said straightforwardly that the reason that
Osiris got overthrown by said he got chopped into pieces and his pieces
distributed throughout the state in the mythological representation and those
pieces were actually the provinces of Egypt technically speaking so and that's
what the Egyptians thought so that's quite cool but the Egyptians said
explicitly that the reason that Osiris got overthrown by set was because he was
willfully blind old senile and willfully blind same idea as the flood myth you
don't see that quite here because Mufasa is sort of on to set or to scar but scar
is more treacherous than Mufasa believes and he gets at he gets at Mufasa by
going through his son by by by playing on on the impulsivity and and juvenile
qualities of his son so obviously there's some antagonism
between these two as you can see by their facial expressions there and there
is a good example of scar you know he's got that droopy kind of whiny malevolent
face and that malevolent voice that Jeremy Irons pulls off so incredibly
well and he's always skulking he's a creature of the night he always skulks
around he's not a creature of the day in any sense of the word and you know
obviously Mufasa is golden like the Sun and scars dark like the night that's
another thing another clue another hint okay there's the tree that's The Tree of
Life we already talked about that I think that represents the multiple
levels at which you exist simultaneously all the way from the subatomic all the
way up to the cosmic so to speak and that's a different kind of dimension and
that's the that's the place that the self inhabits and it can kind of move up
and down those dimensions but anyways that the shaman lives inside that tree
and and that's our first introduction to him basically but he's the spirit of the
ancient tree that's another way of thinking about a very very common
element in stories right the spirit of the ancient tree and so all right so now
Mufasa has taken taken Simba up to the top of the pyramid right so that's the
the aluminum place let's say or the place of the eye where you can really
see a long ways and he's explaining to him what his kingdom is going to be and
you see the Sun of course appears that that to begin with and that's another
hint about being at the top that's the illuminated part of the pyramid and so
they're up there talking and what Mufasa tells Simba is that his kingdom is
everyplace the light has touched and that's so brilliant so one of the things
you'll notice if you move into a new apartment you're like a cat cats don't
like changing houses and they have to zoom around in every corner to see
exactly what the hell's going on there before they calm down they need to know
where they can hide and where the potential dangers are and what you'll
find if you move into a new place that you will not be comfortable there until
you've investigated potentially cleaned and repaired every single square inch of
it the more attention you pay to it the more it'll become yours and that's far
more than mere like material ownership which is also relevant
but in order to feel comfortable somewhere and to dominate that place to
be in meshed in that place you have to attend to it you have to shine light on
every corner and you have to do that with yourself and with your
relationships as well and so anyways Mufasa tells Simba that his kingdom is
everything that the light shines on and that's exactly right and then there's a
metaphor there too which is that what you've Shawn light on which is what
you've come to understand and master is surrounded by an Otherworld of all the
things that you don't understand and some of those would be natural things
and some of them would be tyrannical things and some of those would be things
you don't want to know about yourself but they're outside of where you've
managed to shine the light and so that's exactly what Mufasa tells Simba says we
live in this pyramid we're at the top there's a domain of light around it
that's explored territory outside of that there's explore unexplored
territory and that's partly the unconscious because you fill it with
fantasy and it's partly what you just don't know and then Mufasa tells Simba
and it's sort of like God telling Adam and even in the Garden of Eden not to
eat the apple Mufasa tells Simba there's that this outside place that's dark
that's not part of your kingdom and you should not go there and that's really
interesting because Simba doesn't even know about that place yet and so Mufasa
is doing something very contradictory there it's like telling him that it
exists and and heightening his curiosity but also saying that he should go there
almost ensuring that that's exactly what Simba is going to do you see this in the
Pinocchio movie to where Pinocchio is planning to jump into the ocean to go
get Geppetto from the underworld and he's following his conscience is along
with him Jiminy Cricket and the cricket is warning him about all
the dangers that he'll face down there and telling him that he will be fish
food personally and while he's doing that
Pinocchio ties a knot around his donkey tail around a rock so he can sink and
and the little cricket helps him tie the knot so well he's warning him about the
adventure he's going to undertake at the same time he's encouraging him to do it
and there's that paradoxical thing which is that if you go outside what you know
it will cause a fall because it'll damage your knowledge structures and
you'll go down into chaos and that can really destroy you so you should
do it but by the same token if you do do it and you do it successfully then the
new you that are' arises can be stronger and more complete than the previous you
so you should do it and you shouldn't do it and that's anyone sensible says look
don't bother right but sensible isn't enough that's the thing you have to also
be not sensible enough in order to live and your typical hero and Harry Potter
is a really good example is always a rule breaker always but he you know the
rules he breaks are like there's judicious nough speaking the hero breaks
a rule in the service of a higher good but he's still breaking the rules and
that's what puts them outside the boundary of the social of the social
establishment so now at this point Simba also gets introduced to scar and that
that that has two meanings one is that scar is the tyrannical element of the
state and so as a child when you're being socialized you encounter the
tyranny of the state and one of the best you can't yet there's no way around it
one of the best examples of that is that children are always running around
having fun and they're really bubbly and and impulsive and joyous and playful and
that causes a lot of trouble because positive emotion is very disruptive
they'll run around and break things they'll hurt themselves and they'll get
into trouble and so you're always saying calm down sit down behave don't do that
and it's it's not because they're crying or angry it's because there's a day I'm
happy and impulsive that no one can stand them and so and so that's a
tyranny it's like that the state puts puts pressure on you to regulate your
emotions positive negative and positive and it crushes you it crushes the life
out of you a lot of it and so you end up you know your age and you're all mopey
because the holes especially because you've been forced to sit down in school
for like 17 years you're all mopey and it's no wonder you know you've had the
spirit taken out of you by the process of discipline but without that you'd be
completely useless so it's another one of those paradoxical you know gifts and
and catastrophes that you encounter as you move through life so anyways Simba
look at how happy he is you know I mean he doesn't know a damn thing he's so
naive you can tell but oh look it's my uncle Scar it's like you know and this
is not a guy you smile at clearly but he's all positive emotion
and joy and enthusiasm and that's not good because that means this character
can take serious advantage of it and that's exactly what he does and so scar
pretends to be on his side which is what a good pedophile always does by the way
and so you know you you take advantage of the child's trusting nature and
openness in order to exploit them and that's that's what horrible people do
that all the time including the parents of children and other children
themselves so you know there's this false I mean look at the animators are
so damn brilliant Hey look at that expression really like you know you just
look at that and you think well that's just a facial expression but of course
it's not some damn animators worked really hard to get that they're really
observant and they distill the facial looks like the face is right it covers
the whole head and and they've got the eyebrow lifts proper and they've got
this horrible sanctimonious smile and the tilt of the head then you know and
he's sort of crushing him while he's hugging him at the same time and really
really and you know it took a lot of thought for every single one of these
frames to be put together right there's a tremendous amount of cognitive effort
that went into that so none of this is accidental
yeah well that pretty much says everything it's like whoo I hate that
kid and to hardly wait till he's gone and didn't I pull one over on him you
know it's a real testament to an adult's genius when he can fool a kid so then
Simba encounters the anima that's the anima the Jungian anima and the anima is
the feminine counterpart in the soul and she well yeah you could tell what she
does to him right because she's got this supercilious and and what would you say
judgmental and teasing look on her face and she's really trying to put him down
and it's work it like bad he's not very happy about that at all and she's the
thing this is what the anima does the soul she's the thing that teaches the
exploratory hero that that it's not everything it could be right and that's
part of this can be read multiple ways but it's part of the eternal tendency of
women to makes men self-conscious by their sexual selectivity that's part of
it because that makes men self-conscious like nothing else and it's also perhaps
been one of the phenomena that's produced the evolutionary arms race in
this in the sex is among human beings that's caused
our rapid cortical expansion and our quick movement away from chimpanzees who
aren't selective mater's by the way so look at him Jesus you just want to slap
him right he's a he's the son of a king so he's very very privileged and he
confuses his privilege with competence rich of course all of you do because
you're all sons of the King which is why you can sit here in the university and
you confuse your privilege with competence as well because it's not has
nothing to do with any of you that the lights are on and that's the place is so
peaceful right but you take that for granted and
it can make you false and arrogant like like Jesus that's just so sad you look
at that kid you think he's he's in for real trouble man he thinks he knows
everything and of course then he has a wrestling match with what's-her-name
what's it was it Nala yeah he has a wrestling match with Nala and she just
pins him every time right gotcha again pindy again and that's basically right
one of the things that happens with men when they meet a woman who they really
desire that Myers they project an idea onto her immediately that's an anima
projection and then that Adam a projection judges them and they act all
inferior and stupid and it's partly because they are that's why and so then
they they go down in defeat constantly to this thing that they're projecting
which at least has some concordance with the actual woman but not that much so
okay they keep wrestling and then they're on the fringe of the kingdom
this wrestling match between this pairs of opposites takes them to the edge of
the kingdom and they end up in the elephant's graveyard right and and
there's there's bones everywhere and so now they're out into the kingdom of
death and what that means is that these two kids as they've grown up encounter
death right they go outside the light it's very very shocking for them they're
very curious about it obviously they go to explore the skeletons and all of that
even though they were told not to but their curiosity they can't stay away
from death they're too curious about it and so they developed knowledge of death
and that and then of course out there in the Deadlands is where the hyenas are
and that's exactly right because hyenas are scavengers right and they can break
bones with their teeth they're really really quite the animal and you know you
kind of have a shudder of repugnance when you see those things
and I think it's partly I mean we shared an evolutionary landscape with the
ancestors of hyenas for a very very long time and like vultures too you know you
couldn't imagine something that would be more well designed to look like it was a
horrible thing than a vulture right and there's this weird concordance and crows
and ravens are like that - carrion eaters you know the Eagles are kind of
an exception but they look just as creepy as they are which is really quite
interesting and of course hyenas fall into that category and they laugh -
which is you know really you you also have to laugh really with all these
other things you have going for you and anyways the hyenas and hyenas are
enemies of lions and they can take lions down they're tough things and you know
they're not one high in obviously but a bunch of hyenas can give a lie in a
pretty damn rough time and so and these little lines are really
no match for the hyenas so they get threatened very very rapidly and one of
the hyenas of course is just completely out of its mind and one of the things
that's really interesting and you see this with the Muppets - there was often
a puppet that was like a crazy puppet and its eyes would move in different
directions you know and one of the things that happens with people who are
schizophrenic is they show involuntary eye movements and it's because you have
a brain center that controls your eyes voluntarily and you have another one
that controls them involuntarily so you can see that look ahead and try to move
your eyes smoothly back and forth you can't do it you'll see that they jerk
hey but if you watch put a finger in front of your face and then do this
they'll move perfectly smoothly and that's because you're using different
eye control centers one voluntary and one more involuntary and the involuntary
one is actually more sophisticated and so in schizophrenic the involuntary eye
control centers tend to disrupt the voluntary eye control centers and that's
likely part of the hallucinatory process you know because you have the ego in
this schizophrenic that's being disrupted by processes underneath
fantasies and that sort of thing and that looks like it's reflected in
involuntary eye movements like like dream movements so anyways so much for
the crazy hyena and they're in real trouble now the Kings I who's supposed
to be keeping an eye on this and was supposed to be watching Simba is trying
to intervene but I mean look at him he's a like a delicious little bird and so
that's not working out very well anyways and then you see this immediate
juxtaposition of the domain of death and the hyenas with hell right and everyone
looks at that and they think well they know exactly what that means it's no
surprise to anyone that that happens and I suppose that's partly because on the
veldt where we evolved in large part but not by no means all part fire was an
ever-present danger in the grasslands right and so and so that's a good that's
a good example of Hell so huh well I guess that's it we'll do some more of
this when we meet on Tuesday bye you