Why Being Nice Is Destroying Your Family

What does a punk rock concert full of sneering nihilists have to do with the oldest question about how to live? In this lecture, the final numbers of a long tour, Jordan Peterson begins somewhere unexpected: a Ramones show decades ago, where a room full of people who claimed life was meaningless could not stop moving to the music. That contradiction becomes a thread he pulls until something enormous comes loose, a case that the meaning you insist isn't there is woven into the way you perceive, the way you listen, and the aim you set without realizing you have set it. Along the way he takes apart the fantasy of a life without struggle, asks why a seventy-year-old man asleep in comfort is the least enviable figure in the Bible, and arrives, in the quietest moment of the night, at a piece of advice about love so simple and so practical that you will wonder why no one ever told you. What begins with a joke about slam dancing ends with a question you answer every time you decide what to look for. This lecture was recorded on February 5th, 2024 in Manchester, New Hampshire. Use code JBPESSAY for 40% off Essay or click here: https://essay.app/?promo=JBPESSAY Unlock the ad-free experience of The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast and dive into exclusive bonus content on DailyWire+. Start watching now: http://dwpluspeterson.com/yt ALL LINKS: https://feedlink.io/jordanbpeterson // LINKS // Peterson Academy https://petersonacademy.com Books - https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/books/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Are you noticing your car insurance rate creep up even without tickets or claims? You're not alone. That's why there's Jerry, your proactive insurance assistant. Jerry handles the legwork by comparing quotes side by side from over 50 top insurers, so you can confidently hit buy. No spam calls, no hidden fees. Jerry even tracks rates and alerts you when it's best to shop. Drivers who save with Jerry could save over $1,300 a year. Don't settle for higher rates. Download the Jerry app or visit jerry.ai/wire today.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  There's something about fall that changes the rhythm of your evenings. The sun starts going down earlier, the nights get a little cooler, and suddenly staying in with a good book and getting to bed in a reasonable hour sounds pretty great. And lately, I've genuinely been looking forward to getting into bed because I've been sleeping on the Thermo Balance Elite from Brooklyn Bedding. It's comfortable, supportive, and designed with temperature-regulating materials that help keep you cool and comfortable throughout the night. The more time I spend sleeping on it, the more I've appreciated just how much thought Brooklyn Bedding puts into making a great mattress. Every mattress is designed and assembled in their Arizona factory with quality materials and real American craftsmanship. And if you're ready to make your own bedroom a little more inviting this fall, Brooklyn Bedding gives you a 120-night comfort trial to make sure you find the right fit.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  Go to brooklynbedding.com and use my promo code PREY at checkout to get 30% off site-wide during the fall sale, exclusive with my code. That's brooklynbedding.com and promo code PREY for 30% off site-wide. Support our show and let them know we sent you in the survey after checkout. BrooklynBedding.com promo code PREY.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. The message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird. Okay, one judgment. Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch.

• 1:51Speaker 03

  Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan. Equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com.

• 2:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  Hi, everybody. Welcome to the release of the ninth lecture from my extensive tour archives. They've been received very well. I've been happy to have the opportunity to offer everyone lectures, a style of YouTube utilization that I began with, you know, more than 10 years ago now. I think I started really in about 2013, maybe even before that, when YouTube was just cute cat videos. I've been writing a lot this week, trying to puzzle out a conundrum. I guess it's the conundrum of monotheism. It's a topic I refer to in the lectures fairly frequently. What unites a culture?

• 2:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  What has to unite a culture? What hierarchy of values? Because values are comparative, they have to be ranked order. What hierarchy of values best serves a culture? And if it's a hierarchy, that implies it's a unity and that there's something at the pinnacle or reversed something at the foundation. I'm trying to puzzle out what that has to be and why, and how that's related to our religious thinking. While doing this writing, by the way, several hours a day now, so I'm pretty happy about that. I'm using a program, an app that my son and I developed called essay.app, and it's turned into a really elegant word processor that also teaches you how to write, teaches you how to organize sentences,

• 3:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  teaches you how to rewrite the sentences, to organize the paragraphs, to rewrite the paragraphs, to write your first draft, to do the finessing. And I'm finding it very helpful. It's a mature product now, and it flows seamlessly from computer to telephone. So if I'm traveling, it's very easy in the car, for example, to keep writing. And so, and I'm out a bit now, so that's been very helpful. Anyways, I thought I'd put in a good word for essay.app because it's quite an elegant program, and I found it real useful. In any case, welcome to the ninth lecture. I hope you find it useful.

• 4:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  I hope you find it as useful as I found it a privilege to be able to deliver it. I loved being on tour, and it was such a remarkable adventure and such a remarkable opportunity to speak with so many thousands of people on a continuing basis. So, on with the show. Thank you.

• 4:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  I found out in 2017, when I was doing a lecture series on Genesis, Book of Genesis, which was really the first fully public lecture series that I had done. We rented a theater, my family and I rented a theater of about 500 people in Toronto, and it was something I, this series was something I had dreamed about doing for a long time. And I suppose this lecture tonight is an extension of that dream. I had an ambition to walk through the body of biblical stories publicly at some point. And so that's where it started. And that was in fall of 2017.

• 5:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  My YouTube channel was doing well, and there had been a lot of political, it was really philosophical scandal around me, I would say. A lot of what is actually philosophical scandal in our culture is masquerading as political scandal because we don't render unto Caesar what is Caesar and unto God what is God's. And so that means the sacred has collapsed into the political, and that's why nobody can talk to anyone anymore, right? Because you tread on sacred ground at your peril, and you'll have no doubt experienced exactly that phenomenon in the inability that many of you now have

• 6:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  to even talk to close family members or people who were once friends. In any case, I was interested in elaborating on these biblical stories, not least because I had spent a lot of time lecturing at Harvard and at the University of Toronto. You know, I used to be able to say at Harvard with a certain sense of, what would you say? Incredulity that I was, that I had the privilege to teach there. And now I gotta tell you, when I utter that word, there's some shame. And that, that's a catastrophe.

• 6:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  What happened in DC with Claudine Gay, with the president of MIT, with UPenn, you want to pay attention to that. That was a catastrophe. It's appalling, and I have launched, am launching this new university endeavor with my daughter, but I take no satisfaction whatsoever in the fact that these truly, these once truly great institutions, Harvard and MIT perhaps foremost among them, have now become not only incapable of doing what they are required to do, but actually doing the reverse. Because no education is better than miseducation.

• 7:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, in any case, I decided to embark on this series of biblical lectures. I really had no idea what was going to happen. I had been lecturing about stories for a long time, and I'm a clinical psychologist. And as a clinical psychologist, really what you do is have people tell you their stories and listen and see if you can help them, see if you can provide them a forum so that they can put themselves together by telling someone who they are. And that's an extremely interesting endeavor. And one piece of information you might leave here with tonight

• 8:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  is this observation, which I certainly found to be true in my clinical practice. If the person you're talking to is dull, you're not doing a very good job of listening. And if you're tired of your wife or your husband, you're tired of your friends, you find people in general dull, it's probably not them. And that's a really useful thing, you know? And I would say there's a certain kind of cowardice in that. There's a certain kind of ignorance, but there's a certain kind of cowardice because it's actually the case if you let people reveal themselves, and they will if you listen, people will tell you everything.

• 9:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  Everything, if you listen. And then they become unbearably interesting. And I think it's to shield, we shield ourselves against that unbearable connection by failing to listen. And so whenever I was in a clinical session and I found my mind wandering, I realized that I wasn't listening intently enough. I wasn't asking, searching enough questions to keep the conversation deep enough so that it was entirely and thoroughly engrossing. And, you know, I used to, my clinical practice was mostly, not entirely, but mostly limited to one day.

• 9:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  And I would see usually about 13 people, which took about 14 hours. It was a very long day. I used to go to the restaurant, a little cheap restaurant with my family afterwards. And the rule was, don't say anything to dad that is more than one sentence long because I couldn't pay it, I was done by that point. But it was fascinating. It was fascinating to have the opportunity to walk through people's stories. The courses I taught were story predicated. I learned, especially from the psychoanalytic thinkers, that our personalities make themselves manifest across time as a story.

• 10:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  We're characters on the stage, as Shakespeare observed. And in those courses, I dealt with an array of deep stories, some from the Taoist tradition, some from ancient Mesopotamia, some from ancient Egypt, and then a variety of stories from the Jewish tradition and the Christian tradition, Hindu stories, Greek, Scandinavian, all of them with something profound to offer. And I did a lot of analysis of pop culture, movies like The Lion King, rap videos, like the one Ben Shapiro just released

• 11:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  in this most bizarre of all possible universes. And the Genesis series was a logical extension of that. And I'd come to understand very deeply by that point Those stories, they sit at the base of our culture. And they're not replaceable. Well,

• 11:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  they're replaceable by idols. That's a good way of thinking about it, but this is true culturally, but it's also true psychologically. Although you don't know this, and this is a realization that I've really come to recently.

• 11:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  The biblical corpus of stories is implicit in the structure through which you see the world. Now, that's not much more than saying that because you're the inheritors of the Judeo-Christian tradition, that's shaped the way you view the world. But you have to think through and understand what that means. It means that within the confines of your imagination, the imagination that structures your vision

• 12:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  are nested better or worse representations of these fundamental stories. They're there. They guide the way you understand the world insofar as you're enculturated in that tradition. They make it possible for you, for example, for you to understand a movie like The Dark Knight with its antithesis between the hero Batman, the dark hero, and the Joker, because that's a retelling of Cain and Abel. Now, I'm not saying if you never heard the story of Cain and Abel, you wouldn't be able to understand Batman, although there's some real truth in that. I'm saying that the structure of comprehension that enables you to understand that story

• 13:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  is a consequence of your incorporation in part of the network of stories that lies at the base of your culture. Now, the people who founded your country knew this because they said strange things when founding your culture like,

• 13:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  "We hold these truths to be self-evident." Now, a self-evident truth requires no further explanation in some sense by definition, but a psychologist might ask, "Well, what is it that makes a truth self-evident?" And the answer is something like, "It emerges out of the corpus of stories that you take for granted." Right? And those are the stories that organize, they are the stories that organize our life. And so

• 13:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  one of the things that you might realize in consequence of that is that if you're not fleshed out well on the cultural side, so for example, if you don't know the biblical stories, and there are other stories as well that you could and should know, but if you don't know the biblical stories, there are holes and the web of meaning through which you view the world is incomplete and tattered and torn, and other things will move in there to occupy you. And that's, that's a terrifying thing to understand. You know, I started to understand this when I was studying the psychoanalysts deeply because

• 14:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  Jung, for example, Carl Jung, who was a compatriot of Sigmund Freud, who was the founder of the psychoanalytic tradition. Jung was a student of Friedrich Nietzsche, and Friedrich Nietzsche is the German philosopher who so famously announced that God was dead. He could see the

• 14:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  deterioration of our explicit belief in the deity of our ancestors within the confines of the Judeo-Christian tradition. He could see that falling apart under the onslaught of the materialistic atheistic rationalists of the Enlightenment. And

• 15:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  that's why he made that prophetic pronouncement. And Nietzsche knew that there would be dreadful trouble in the aftermath of the death of God. And he knew that that would, he knew, for example, that that would produce the rise of totalitarian superstates like the Soviet Union and Maoist China, and that millions of people would die in consequence. So when Nietzsche announced that God was dead, it wasn't like he was doing it in triumph. He called us the murderer of all murderers. And so and so Nietzsche tried to come up with a solution to that, and his solution was that human beings could take it upon themselves to establish their own values, that we would have to become the creatures who

• 16:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  determined the rules by which things were valued, who determined the moral order. And, you know, that sounds attractive. It sounds like captain of your own ship. But even if you're captain of your own ship, you're not master of the waves. And even if you're captain of your own ship, you still have to navigate towards some desirable destination. And as a consequence of that, you're locked in this wrestling, you might say, with the fundamental structure of existence itself. I learned in the 2017 series that

• 16:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  the word Israel, the chosen people of God, means we who wrestle with God. And then you might say, "Well, who are those people?" And the answer is, "Well,

• 16:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  do you ever feel like shaking your fist at the sky in despair and rage? Do you ever lose hope? Are you ever inspired? Are you ever in a moral quandary when you're caught between two terrible possibilities, both good? And you're, you're, you're, you're, you're attempting to wrangle an estimate of your fate." Well, you, that's life.

• 17:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Life is wrestling with the domain of value with the

• 17:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  with the, with this, even with the central essence of value itself. And there's no escape from that. And there are worse and better solutions to that problem. And part of what I'm trying to understand is what is the best possible solution to that problem? Is, is there a best solution to that problem? And if so, what is the best solution? And so that's what this lecture tonight will be

• 18:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  part and parcel of.

• 18:04Speaker 05

  Imagine your favorite lecture. Dial that on Max, put that on steroids, and then add some cinematic elements to it. That's the best way I could describe a Peterson Academy lecture.

• 18:18Speaker 06

  I went to college because I had to. I go to Peterson Academy because I want to. I'm still paying off college from 10 years ago, and I'm also still questioning the value that I got out of college.

• 18:27Speaker 05

  Traditional universities, a lot of times, it's just pretty dry. They don't bring the same energy as the professors at Peterson Academy.

• 18:34Speaker 06

  It is a completely different experience to learn from somebody who actually wants to teach you.

• 18:38Speaker 03

  If you've been on the fence about this, this is the time. That thing that's calling to you, you won't have an answer for it unless you enroll and see for yourself. You have the opportunity to investigate that calling.

• 18:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now, Nietzsche said we should create our own values, but Jung in particular, Freud first, noted that

• 19:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  well, we, we, we can't. And, and you might say, "Well, what, what, what did they mean by that?" They, they said, "Well, if you, if you contend with people, if you wrestle with people, what you find is that they're, they're like demon-filled warehouses." There's all sorts of things going on in the background that aren't exactly under people's control. They're possessed by strange ideas, or if not ideas, strange impulses, and impulses that act contrary to their own will. And you know this, you know this, because you'll have been in the situation where you've told yourself to do something.

• 19:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  And maybe you've told yourself to do something over and over, and not only that, you've told yourself to do something that you know would be good for you. And not only do you not do that,

• 19:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  you do exactly the opposite and repeatedly, as if there was something inside you that was trying to do its worst. Well, so then you might say, "Well, how can a creature as perplexing and paradoxical as that possibly hope to, in the span of a single lifetime, revalue all values and create his or her own destiny?" It's like,

• 20:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  maybe what you do is you search for the implicit moral order and you align yourself with that. There's a reason I open these lectures with music. I spend a lot of time thinking about music.

• 20:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  Forty years ago, I was obsessed with music from a psychological perspective for about a year. I made a piece of art, which is on the cover of my books.

• 20:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's a Mandela, essentially, a kind of a fiery geometric explosion of chaos and order. And I made that over about four months when I was trying to understand the ineffable significance of music. And the reason I was so interested in music was because I was interested in nihilism. I was interested in meaninglessness. And music seemed to me to be the inarguable counterpart to nihilism in that even the most nihilistic of people find deep meaning in music. And at about that time, it wasn't much long... The punk rock movement was still flourishing at about that time, in the early 80s.

• 21:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  And I went to a Ramones concert and it was in a theater, just a movie theater, with sat about 1,200 people. And I was up on the balcony with my wife, right on the first row. And those bloody musicians, the Ramones, they brought their stadium gear into that theater. And I tell you, I listened to the whole concert with my ears plugged and it was... I was still ringing, my ears were still ringing three days later, even though it was tremendous fun. And beneath us, where we could peer over the balcony, beneath us was a kind of an empty space in front of the stage. And all these crazy nihilistic punk rockers were out there while the concert was going on, slam dancing into each other. They looked like ants on a frying pan.

• 22:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  And it was ridiculously comical because they're all nihilistic and they hate life and they have their middle finger up to the sky and it's screw this and to hell with that. And there's no meaning in life and yet they're all out there like dancing away now, pretty violently and all that. But the thing is, the music gripped them nonetheless.

• 22:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  And that was a great mystery to me, you know? And I started to think about music and there is this conceit that music is a non-representational art form because especially a music without... A piece of music without lyrics, it's hard to say what it's about. You know, like it can have a sad tone perhaps, if it's in a minor key in it. It can be cataclysmic and thunderous or it can be puerile, like muzak in an elevator, which really isn't music. It's music filtered through stupidity.

• 23:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  But I started to try to understand, what is music exactly? Well, music, what is music exactly? Well, it's a pattern. Pattern is something that repeats. It's a pattern with variations. It's a layered pattern with variations. It's layers stacked on top of one another. And the more sophisticated the music, the more layers there are stacked on top of one another. And the more the layers interplay with one another, maybe one instrument per layer or something like that. But it's layers of harmonious patterns. And then I thought, that's what the world is. Because we think the world is a world of objects

• 23:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  because we're implicitly atheistic, materialist rationalists. And so we think the world is made out of self-evident objects. And by the way, it's not.

• 24:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's made out of patterns. And it's made out of patterns that when optimally arranged, operate together in a hierarchy of harmony. And that's what music tells you. And it tells you so directly that it compels you to move to it. And what the music is doing to you is inviting you to align yourselves with the central pattern of harmonious being. And everyone loves that. And the reason they love that is because it's right. That's what you're called upon to do.

• 24:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  And that's why... And you know that, even though you might not be able to say it. You know it and you can tell you know it because when a great musician comes to town, you'll pay and take time to go sit with thousands of people and all do that together. And you'll enjoy it and you'll... And you won't regard it as work. And if the place gets jumping, you're pretty damn thrilled to be there. And you think, well, that was damn near a religious experience. It's like, yeah, not damn near. Like, definitely. It was just the kind of religious experience that the prideful linguistic intellect can't criticize out of existence. That doesn't make it any less real, quite the contrary.

• 25:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  It speaks of something tremendously deep. It speaks of the spirit of the redeeming story. And that's a good way to think about it. And that's the spirit that makes itself manifest in the biblical corpus. And, well, we'll wander through some of that tonight. And I'll do what I can to explain some of the opening parts of that story in a way that I hope makes sense.

• 26:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. Now, this is an interesting image. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. We'll see how many words we can get out of this image.

• 26:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  So that's an image of God as a father. Now, what does it mean? What does it mean to... For there to be a father first? And this is a father who brings light. And maybe you were fortunate enough to have a father that brought light. Not everybody is. Tammy was, I was. I know the people that I've interviewed who've thrived. Almost all of them had a father that brought them light, who encouraged them and who stood behind them, who was dedicated to developing and encouraging the best in them.

• 27:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so what is that exactly? Well, you might say that's your father. But you have to observe that father is actually a generic term, right? You don't call your father his name, unless you're Bart Simpson. You call your father a generic name. And that means in some sense that you're referring, in your relationship with him, to... You could say a role he's playing, that's one way of looking at it. A part he's playing. Or you could say that you're referring to something deep that he's embodying insofar as he's a good father. That's a better way of thinking about it. Now, here's a way of understanding that. Imagine you were... You're three years old.

• 27:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  And your eyes are open, man, and everything's coming in at you. You know how imitative three-year-olds are? You send a three or four-year-old off, even well-behaved three or four-year-old, off to daycare and they come back completely infested with demons. And they'll... I saw this in my son all the time. He'd come back from daycare, this kid who was reasonably civilized, he'd only have to be there for an hour. He'd pick up some pathological pattern of miserable misbehavior from some wretched little brat with parents who were foolish and he'd come home and play that out. It was like, what the hell do you think you're doing? You know perfectly well, that's not going to go very well. It's like, no, he's absorbed that sucker

• 28:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  and he was going to see if that was a trick that would work at home. It's like, kids are very good at this. They absorb spirits. That's a good way of thinking about it. Now, we're very imitative, human beings. We're unbelievably imitative. Like, if you're socially skilled, you don't even know this. If you're socially skilled, when you're sitting and talking to someone, you're dancing with them. And if you recorded your interactions and you sped it up, you'd see that. Two people who are really engrossed in a conversation, they're just dancing. That's been done with mothers and babies. Depressed mothers don't dance with their babies.

• 29:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right? And it's because they're too... They've withdrawn within and they're not attending to the relationship. And the babies suffer as a consequence.

• 29:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so you dance with someone and you absorb their spirit or you create a spirit between you when you're conversing. And if you're both pursuing the truth when you're conversing, then you jointly construct the spirit that pursues the truth and that inhabits you and that fills your... With enthusiasm. And that's the logos that Tammy made reference to earlier. That Christ described as present if two or more were gathered in his name. That's what that means. Now, children are very imitative and it's really the basis of their knowledge and so. When you first start to adapt to the world, you learn how to move in it, right? But you learn how to.

• 30:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  You learn how to imitate movements in the world in a complex way. If a child does something interesting, you'll have seen this with nine months old, you know? You were trying to feed them. Say thirteen months, they're in their high chair, you're trying to feed them and then they knock something off the. The high chair table and top and. It falls on the ground and that's pretty interesting and so then you put it back on, they knock it off again. And that's pretty interesting and so you put it on, they knock it off again. What they're doing actually is imitating themselves, right? Cause they did something kind of random and it produced an interesting consequence. And so they duplicate the interesting consequence and so kids copy themselves. Now you know that because that's how you learn to play peekaboo with them.

• 30:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right? You can get them into an imitative game very quickly, even if they're very young. My, my granddaughter, when she was nine months, nine.

• 31:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  Four months old. I had her on my lap and she was standing up and I. She's very alert, this girl, and extremely extrovert and she was really like zeroed in on me and I thought. I wonder if I can play a game with this kid, so. I, I, I went one, two, three. Little pause and bonked her head on mine, like very lightly, eh? And then she kind of looked and then. I was slow and careful with her because babies are slow, you know, which is a good thing and. And then I did it again. And I kept repeating it and she got, she caught on and she, she got the pattern, right? She was starting to align herself with it. And then I did it like six times, let's say to establish the pattern and then the seventh time I counted.

• 31:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  And I didn't bop, I moved her forward, but I didn't bop. Heads with her and she laughed. And I thought. Perfect, she got that. That. Theme and variation, right? That's part of a game, that's what you do when you play peekaboo too and there's mimicry in that. You, you set up a pattern, then you repeat it, then you repeat it, then you repeat it, then you vary it. Like interestingly and that's a game and that's a social interaction and that's the structure. On which all of our social interactions are predicated. Alright, a certain predictability of interaction with a leaven of novelty. There's something deeply musical about that now. Children will imitate themselves, but they'll also imitate. Their father. So now let's imagine we have kids who are four years old.

• 32:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  And it's a boy and a girl and they're trying to get to know each other. And so what they are going to try to figure out is could they play a game together? Which is by the way, what you're doing when you get to know someone, at least under optimal circumstances. And so maybe the boy says to the girl or vice versa. Would you like to play house? Which means would you like to dramatically re-represent a domestic environment? Spontaneously in your behavior, but generally that isn't what four year olds say. They just compress that. Would you like to play house and the girl? Who's invited has to say yes, because if she doesn't do it voluntarily.

• 33:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Then it's not a game and that's something you should bloody well learn when you're four. So you never forget it for the rest of your life. And so maybe she says yes and then you say, well, she, he says, the little boy says, well, I'll be the daddy and you can be the mommy and. Hypothetically, although God only knows.

• 33:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  Both of them agree that that's appropriate and.

• 33:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  And then the boy starts to act out father. But then you might ask, this is so cool, it's so amazing, it's such a miracle. You might say, well, now he's going to imitate his father. But that's not what he does. Cause kids are way smarter than that, like if I was going to imitate someone, I'll imitate this gentleman right here in the. Front row, so this is what I would do.

• 34:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so what I'm doing and you know, it's kind of annoying when someone imitates you directly, even if it's a little kid. And you can do that as a joke, but. What imitation means directly is that I do exactly what you do. Either when you do it or a little later. But that isn't what kids do, not, not at all. They're so much smarter than that and it really is a miracle, what they do is they. They watch their father. Act across repeated instances and situations, right? Thousands of them, because they're watching you like a hawk and. And they're building a model of you. That helps them understand you, but is also the.

• 34:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Scaffold on which they build their masculinity. That's a good way of thinking about it and so they're watching you like mad and they're testing you out too, they're gonna. Pull out every trick they can possibly manage to poke you with. Just to see. How the pattern that constitutes you will react to all these different experiments and that's. You might ask, why do your children misbehave and the answer is, well, it's an exploratory tool. And that's why you provoke your wife and that's why she provokes you, it's like. Who the hell are you anyways? Like you could ask someone, but like what do you know about who you are? It's like you're mysterious, just like everyone else and so if you want to learn, get to know someone, you have to.

• 35:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  Sneak up on them and. Do something a little out of the ordinary and see how they respond. And so children are doing that all the time and while they're doing that, they're mapping you. Like mad and they're learning to imitate you and then they're not just doing that by watching you. They're doing that by watching other fathers, they're doing that by watching. TV shows about fathers, they're doing that by watching movies about fathers, they're doing that by being read books about fathers. And what they're doing is they're extracting out a representation of the father as such. And then when they play, they embody that spirit. And they experiment with it in real time. And if they're good at it. They can do it in a way that invites the girl to play.

• 36:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  So that she'll keep playing and that's what you're doing if you're married.

• 36:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  Really? Really? And if you're doing it properly. Then you're playing. And if you say, well, my marriage isn't much of a game, it's like, maybe you're not that good at playing.

• 36:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's a good secret. It's a good secret to know, because one of the things. That you can extract from that piece of knowledge is the following. If you notice. The manner in which you and your wife interact, let's say, or you and your husband. You'll see that sometimes you're playing. And then you may see also that when you're playing, you remember at least briefly. That this is a person you love and that you wanted to be with.

• 37:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  And then you get a little glimpse into what your life could be like. If you got it right all the time. And then you could be humble enough to think.

• 37:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  For whatever reason, I just did something right there. That's unlike what I often do, that leads to whatever misery characterizes our relationship. Maybe if I was careful, I could figure out what that game was. And I could get better at it. And that's something to. Understand and focus on and that is what children are practicing when they're young, because. If the little boy likes the little girl or the reverse, what they want to do. Is establish a pattern of iterative play. So play that repeats across many circumstances. That moves upward that they both want to participate in. That's a friendship.

• 37:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  A friendship is a chain of games that are increasing in complexity and that's what a marriage should be. That's what a marriage should be and if it was conducted properly. Now I understand that. Life gets in the way of play. But that doesn't mean that. Life properly mastered wouldn't be play. Right? Maybe you just have to be sophisticated enough to play the most difficult of games. And maybe even under the most difficult of circumstances. Now that's what Tammy was trying to do, for example, when she was attempting to set her head straight in the. ...the aftermath of the death of her father, which is truly a catastrophic loss. And in the face of the resentment that she was liable to feel, not merely because of that

• 38:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  loss, but maybe because the circumstances surrounding his death weren't...

• 38:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  could be deemed suboptimal, as they so often are. Her realization was that even under those circumstances, your best bet is to aim up, is to aim up, in whatever manner "up" means to you.

• 39:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  In the knowledge as well, that if you aim up, even if your aim is off to begin with, if you learn along the way how you err in your aim, when you're aiming up, all that will happen is that you learn to aim up better and better and better and better, indefinitely, without end.

• 39:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  Because you might say, if you're a cynic, "Well, what's better anyways?" And the proper answer, that is, that's up to you to figure out. Not because you make your own values, that's up to you to discover.

• 39:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  Our aim is often off. That's what "to sin" means. "To sin" means to miss the target, by the way. It's derived both in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin.

• 40:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  The equivalent word for "sin" is always derived from an archery term: to miss the target. While the more you practice aiming at a target, the better you get at hitting it, the farther away you can be from it, and still have your aim be unerring. To begin with, you might be so without skill that you can hardly even make out the target. But that doesn't mean that practice won't make perfect.

• 40:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  Back to the child playing with his would-be-girlfriend. He's embodying the spirit of the Father.

• 40:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  He's embodying the spirit of the benevolent Father, insofar as he's entertaining to play with. He's learning to allow that spirit, which is the essence of what is repeatable across instances of proper fatherhood, to take residence within him.

• 41:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  When the insistence is made in the opening of chapters of Genesis, that God is the spirit that creates in the beginning,

• 41:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  there's a...

• 41:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  there's an insistence that that's the same thing that makes itself manifest in the form of the most benevolent Father.

• 41:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  And that's something very much worth thinking about. There's a lot of ways of bringing light and the order that is good into the world. A family is a realm of potential. A family is a realm of unformed potential.

• 41:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  The spirit of the benevolent Father transforms that into the order that is good, or very good. And it does that by making itself... Let's ask, how does it do that?

• 42:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Someone says, "My father was great. He loved me and I loved him." A great gift for a child to receive. What does that mean, to love someone?

• 42:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  To offer the best in them the best in you. How is that?

• 42:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  See, my father gave me a gift that many of my friends didn't have. My father was a very harsh taskmaster, and it was very difficult for me to do anything that was good enough.

• 42:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  And there's some... You could argue that there was something about that that's cutting, and that's certainly the case. It's the cutting that cuts away everything that isn't worthy. That's what sort of cutting that is. But at the same time, he, in his deepest relationship with me, he communicated to me that if I set my spirit to it, there was nothing I couldn't figure out. And that faith took hold within me as an unshakable conviction. And that's a revelation mediated by my father,

• 43:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  insofar as he was a carrier of the spirit of the benevolent Father, of the fact that human beings are made in the image of God.

• 43:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  And there's no greater gift than that, not least because it's the truth.

• 43:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  Why is it true?

• 43:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, you might ask yourself, "What do you see when you look at the world?" "And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." There's a proposition here. The proposition is that... The proposition is a characterization of the unformed nature of what exists before reality makes itself manifest. Okay, what does that mean? What do you see when you look at someone? Well, you think you see the person you know.

• 44:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  And I would say, "What makes you think you know them?"

• 44:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  And secondly, I would say, "No, you see a concretized starting point for a range of potential adventures." And you might say, "Well, what do you mean by that?" And I might say, "Do you remember when you fell in love?

• 44:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  What did you see?" And you might say, "What do you mean by 'see'?" And I mean the all-encompassing, encompassing seeing. You saw someone that for some reason you could envision spending time with for the rest of your life.

• 45:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  And you saw that as deeply as you could see anything, insofar as you had a sophisticated and well-developed capacity for love. And that love that makes itself manifest when you fall in love is a vision of the highest possibility that you could attain if you conducted yourself properly in the presence of that person. And that's a gift from God, that vision. And you can do what it with... You can do with it what you will. You can minimize it

• 46:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  as a chemically induced delusion. You can become bitter about it because it vanishes because you mistreated it. You can reduce it in any manner you choose to see fit, but all that means is that you've squandered it.

• 46:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  Or you could accept the invitation, which is in some sense what you do when you get married, and say, "I'll stake my life on what I see."

• 46:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  What are you doing if you do that?

• 46:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  You're encountering the ground of possibility itself and making the determination, guided by love, to bring order, the order that is good or the order that is very good, to the part of the world that you have under your influence. And you're doing that, according to this story, because you are literally an embodiment of the process that does that everywhere, that engenders reality itself out of the underlying chaotic possibility.

• 47:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  And there's nothing about that that's mere superstition. There's nothing about that that's archaic or outdated. There's everything about that that's as advanced a view of the structure of reality as that we could possibly imagine, that offers to us an infinitely expanding adventure that unites us psychologically and with other people in a peaceful, productive, and generous union, and that moves us all eternally up Jacob's ladder to the highest possible heights.

• 48:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  And why would that not be not only the most accurate description of reality possible, but simultaneously the most desirable?

• 48:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, the price you pay for that, you might say, is that you're called upon to live in accordance with that spirit. And you're called upon to take the responsibility to do so. You're called upon to act in love, to aim up, and to step forward with all due care in action and word.

• 48:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Aqui está uma proposição.

• 48:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  O Espírito de Deus que desce em Genesis foi identificado na tradição cristã como a Palavra. E a Palavra está simbolicamente associada à pessoa de Jesus Cristo. E isso é um conjunto muito estranho de associações significativas. Não há nada sobre isso que seja óbvio. Mas eu vou te dar um sinal.

• 49:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  Carl Jung descreve a história de Cristo como arca-típula. E ele queria dizer algo muito específico com isso. Ele queria dizer algo assim:

• 49:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  Imagine que você pegasse uma seleção de histórias interessantes. Uma grande seleção de histórias interessantes. Histórias que eram alegre e emocionantes e memoráveis. E então, por algum mecanismo, você foi capaz de destilar das histórias a história, a história meta que era a mais alegre, emocionante e interessante. E olhe: Você vê uma série de filmes de super-heróis e pensa que algum deles foi melhor que todos os outros. Agora, você sabe que todos eles fazem um conjunto. Eles fazem um conjunto de filmes de super-heróis. Você sabe que eles têm temas semelhantes e caracterizações semelhantes. Você tem uma sensação de que há uma distinção qualitativa entre os filmes e que um deles atingiu o ponto de vista melhor que qualquer outro.

• 50:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  E esse é o que você é mais feliz de ir ver. Esse é o que você é mais chances de lembrar. É o que você recomendará aos amigos. É o que vai receber as melhores reviews.

• 50:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  Bem, imagine que você pegasse 10.000 filmes de super-heróis e os destilasse para sua essência. Você tem um mito.

• 50:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  Isso é o que é um mito. É uma destilação, é uma abstração. A razão pela qual Jung disse que a história de Cristo era arca-típula foi porque você não pode contar uma história mais trágica. É um caso limitado. Por quê? Bem,

• 50:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  imagine todas as coisas terríveis que podem acontecer com você.

• 50:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  Vamos passar por elas.

• 50:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  A morte.

• 51:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  Você pode pensar que não há nada pior. Se você pensa que não há nada pior do que a morte, você tem tido uma vida muito protegida.

• 51:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  As pessoas não são geralmente traumatizadas pela morte. Até a sua própria. Elas são muitas vezes traumatizadas pela malévolência.

• 51:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Se você quer desenvolver um desordem de estresse pós-traumatismo, uma das melhores maneiras de fazer é assistir a si mesmo fazendo algo que você não podia imaginar que era capaz de fazer. Isso muitas vezes acontece com soldados, soldados naivos em particular, que foram colocados em um campo de batalha pela primeira vez e encontram-se fazendo coisas que eles não poderiam imaginar que eram capazes de fazer. E talvez até descobrir que a parte mais escura deles que ainda não foi revelada gosta disso de uma maneira que eles não poderiam ter possivelmente imaginado. E isso é o suficiente para derrubar eles, porque eles tiveram um encontro com a própria malévolência. E então podemos adicionar isso à lista. A morte e a malévolência. A representação simbólica última de

• 52:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  o encontro com a malévolência é uma descensão para o inferno. E isso é o que acontece, em princípio, na história de Cristo após a crucificação. Três dias abaixo. Certo, o despoço do inferno. Acontece no deserto com o encontro com Satanás. E o que isso significa para cada um de nós? Significa que você vai ter que competir na sua vida com a realidade da morte e a realidade do mal. De uma maneira ou de outra. Apertando e gritando ou voluntariamente. Essas são as suas opções. Ou, suponho, com a cabeça firmemente enterrada no sanduíche, que é provavelmente o pior dessas três opções. Mas isso não é o suficiente. Isso não é bom o suficiente, bom como é. Como se passa a traição?

• 52:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  Como se passa a traição nas mãos de alguém que você não fez nada além de ser bom para quem é seu melhor amigo? Como se passa a justiça entregue pela mob? Como se passa a justiça entregue pela mob em aliança com um tirano que opressa o seu povo? E etc, etc. A história cristã é a panopla de catástrofe com uma redenção no final. É o padrão da adaptação humana. Assim.

• 53:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  Por quê?

• 53:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  Porque para viver adequadamente, você tem que colocar tudo isso nas suas costas.

• 53:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  E então o que isso tem a ver com a Palavra de Deus que se manifesta no início do tempo? Se você confrontasse o reino da possibilidade da maneira que geraria o ordem que era bom ou muito bom, você faria isso voluntariamente confrontando tudo que vem ao seu lado na sua vida.

• 54:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  E essa é a explicação, pelo menos em parte, para a visão trinitária da cristianidade. Essa capacidade de enfrentar o que for que veio a você, não importa a sua forma, com a cabeça alta e olhos olhando para cima, falando a verdade.

• 54:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  Isso é equivalente ao encontro do Espírito que gera a realidade em si mesmo, não apenas no início do tempo, mas continuamente e para sempre. Na eternidade.

• 54:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  E entender isso e viver isso é tomar o seu papel adequadamente como um filho de Deus. E isso é equivalente a reentrada no paraíso que foi proibido a Adam e Eva. E então isso é o que tudo isso significa.

• 55:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  E eu diria ainda mais, e você pode pensar sobre isso por si mesmo.

• 55:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  Um dos pedaços de... Uma das sugestões que eu fiz online é que jovens podem se esforçar para desenvolver seu caráter para que possam ser a pessoa mais forte no funeral de seu pai. E muitos jovens me vieram e disseram que isso foi um pedaço muito útil de conselhos orientadores, porque uma das coisas que você não sabe o que fazer, uma das situações em que você pode não saber como agir é na cara da própria morte, especialmente na cara da morte de alguém que você ama, porque de alguma forma não há muito que se pode dizer sobre isso. Certo, porque todo mundo no funeral confronta o abismo simultaneamente. E então você pode perguntar a si mesmo: "Bem, como é melhor confrontar o abismo?"

• 55:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  E isso não é diferente, no sentido mais profundo possível, do como confrontar os problemas mais profundos da sua vida. E você pode dizer:

• 56:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  "Você poderia, sob essas circunstâncias, ser de grande serviço para os outros? Você poderia ser o pessoal que eles apoiam? E se você fosse capaz de fazer isso, mesmo ou até incorporar sua própria tristeza no esforço, é possível que isso seria a melhor maneira possível para atravessar aquele particular vale do sombra da morte?

• 56:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Bem, pense sobre isso.

• 56:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  Eu entrevistei este monstro de caráter, Jaco Willink, várias vezes. E Jaco é de quatro pés longo e de três pés de madeira.

• 56:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  Ele come caras fortes para o almoço. E Jaco sabe perfeitamente que se ele tivesse tomado algumas decisões inconvenientes quando era um jovem, que ele poderia ter sido um monstro criminoso. E ele foi ao exército em vez disso. Uma forma civilizada de possibilidade para a malícia. E ele aprendeu lá que

• 57:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  ele... porque ele tinha a oportunidade de fomentar o desenvolvimento de jovens como líder emergente. Ele era um cara de Forças Especiais, não uma coisa fácil de gerir. E ele estava mentindo jovens e ele encontrou isso

• 57:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  mais interessante do que causar problemas. O que é uma boa definição de interesse profundo, porque causar problemas é extremamente interessante. E então se você achar algo melhor do que isso, você é muito sorte. Ele encontrou que se ele se conduzisse como alguém que os jovens olhavam para trás, que podia servir como modelo e que podia levá-los para trás, que podia encorajar eles a desenvolver, que podia ajudá-los, que ele podia encorajar e ajudar a desenvolver, que não houvesse nada que fale mais diretamente, até mesmo para sua alma selvagem.

• 58:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  Não há diferença entre isso e ser o pessoal que as pessoas confiam no funeral. E você sabe, nós sabemos que quanto mais você se concentra em si mesmo, mais miserável você é. Nós sabemos, psicólogos, que não há diferença entre ser miserável e ser consciente de si mesmo. E você pode dizer: "Bem, qual é o antídoto à consciência de si mesmo miserável? É tudo sobre mim e todo meu sofrimento e meu terrível sofrimento e o que eu quero agora. E esse é um caminho para a miséria." E a antítesis de isso não é parar de fazer isso. A antítesis de isso é fazer tudo o que você pode para ser de utilidade, de utilidade produtiva, generosa, para os outros, particularmente quando eles estão em necessidade. E isso é algo que você poderia fazer no funeral.

• 58:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  E se você fosse um mestre nisso, talvez o funeral fosse uma celebração. E eu não estou tentando ser naivoso sobre isso. Eu sei que há uma perda nisso.

• 59:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  Mas há, nessa tristeza, há também um elemento da celebração do fato de que a pessoa que você ama existia. E talvez esse sentimento possa tomar predominância, mesmo em esses tempos deslumbrantes. E talvez a maneira mais adequada, talvez o caminho mais seguro para essa possibilidade de se dizer que take o tempo, mesmo no meio da sua própria tristeza, para garantir que todos os outros são bem-vindos

• 59:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  e confortáveis. Para garantir que você é grato pela presença deles, para garantir que você atende à tristeza deles.

• 59:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  Y encontrar el significado, el significado profundo que está disponible para ti en el mayor servicio posible, en el momento más inoportuno posible. Y luego también te preguntarías: "Dime, dime si no admirarías a alguien que pueda hacer eso".

• 1:00:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  Y luego podrías pensar: "Bueno, imagina que puedes hacer eso". ¿No imaginarías también que estabas alineado con algo que encontrabas profundamente admirable? Y quiero decir desde el núcleo, ¿verdad? No quiero decir como una interpretación racional. Te alejarías de una situación pensando: "Eso es realmente algo, eso es realmente algo para pensar. Eso era realmente inspirador, eso era realmente algo para alcanzar". Y eso es algo que llama, es una manifestación de algo que llama a algo dentro de ti que está buscando ese camino hacia adelante.

• 1:00:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  Eso es lo que es la admiración.

• 1:00:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  La admiración es el instinto de imitar. Es más que eso, es un instinto de imitar el espíritu central animador del Padre Benevolente. Esa es una muy buena forma de pensar sobre ello. "Y el espíritu de Dios se movió sobre el rostro de los ríos". Puedes sentirlo cuando estás inspirado, cuando algo te ocurre, cuando tienes una flama de visión, cuando encuentras tu camino, cuando ves dónde ponerse el pie en el suelo, en tierra firme. Cuando estás seguro de tu paso, cuando estás preciso con tus palabras, cuando cada palabra llega. Cuando estás diciendo exactamente lo correcto en el momento correcto y el lugar correcto.

• 1:01:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Si lo haces, si tienes la gracia de hacerlo, es porque has...

• 1:01:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  has tenido la buena fortuna y posiblemente la humildad de permitir

• 1:01:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  lo mejor de la tradición humana, tomar residencia dentro de ti y hablar.

• 1:01:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Tu consciencia te dirá cómo hacerlo, o al menos cuando no lo haces. Ese es el mensajero de Dios, ese es Hermes, ese es el mensajero de los dioses, es uno de ellos. Tu consciencia es uno de esos espíritus autónomos que hacen la broma de la noción de que puedes crear tus propios valores. Porque tu consciencia, tu consciencia es la voz de sufrimiento mismo.

• 1:02:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Te dice que estás en el camino equivocado. Te dice que has salido del camino dorado hacia arriba y que has avanzado al camino de la perdition. Y puedes hacer lo que puedas para ignorarlo y para racionalizarlo de alguna manera. Y todo eso hará que las cosas se vuelvan peores, y cada persona que ha nacido sabe eso.

• 1:02:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  ¿Cuándo más te sientes que se mueve? Cuando algo se agarra tu atención, cuando algo te llama y te impulsa hacia adelante. Cuando algo le pone interés, cuando algún puente a algo nuevo se manifiesta. Cuando tienes un plan que es inspirador, cuando tienes una visión que es invocante.

• 1:03:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  Esa dicotomía de fuerzas, consciencia y llamado.

• 1:03:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  Esas son las voces dentro, los dos pilares de Dios, podrías decir, que te guían a través del desierto.

• 1:03:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  La gente moderna, Carl Jung dijo: "La gente moderna no ve a Dios porque no se ve lo suficientemente bajo".

• 1:03:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  No son lo suficientemente humildes, esa es una buena forma de pensar. Están esperando la maravillosa manifestación, están esperando a Dios romper las reglas del tiempo y el espacio para que su duda pueda ser aliviar. Bueno, eso es mucho para pedir. Es mucho pedir que las leyes de la realidad mismas sean suspendidas por cualquier momento solo para eliminar tu duda de fe. Y es especialmente mucho pedir cuando es cristal claro que incluso si eso sucediera una semana después, no lo creerías de todos modos.

• 1:04:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Esta es una representación griega de este mismo tipo de idea. ¿Sabes lo que es en la vida cuando todo se descontrola?

• 1:04:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  Eso es demasiada posibilidad y poco actitud, eso es demasiado caos y poco orden. Incluso hay demasiado potencial, porque demasiado potencial se manifiesta como nada más que potencial para problemas.

• 1:04:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  Sabes la historia del hydra, es un serpiente terrible, si cortas una cabeza, se crean siete más. ¿Verdad? Y es muy simple y probable que estés en una situación como esa en tu vida y bastante a menudo. Bueno, hay ecores de esta imitación en las secciones de abertura de la narrativa de Genesis. Hay la insistencia, como Dios describe mucho más tarde a Job, que fue el espíritu que hizo orden de caos, que

• 1:05:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  derrotó al leviathan primordial.

• 1:05:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  Ese es un eco de la vieja historia de los héroes, el héroe contra el dragón. El héroe que corta el dragón en partes y hace el mundo, eso es, eso es, eso es un mito de caza, podrías decir. Y eso es parte del espíritu que nos inhabit, esa capacidad de los seres humanos de salir a los vastos desiertos y enfrentar lo que es más aterrador y transformarlo. Y tomando armas, digamos, erradicar al predador y traer a la casa al demonio. Y eso es parte de la misma colección de ideas que habla de

• 1:06:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  la capacidad humana corajosa de confrontar el potencial y crear el orden que es bueno. Ese es el origen del mito del dragón, ¿verdad? Esa es la historia de Harry Potter, esa es la historia del Rey de los Rincos, esa es la historia de la película Jaws. El héroe que enfrenta al terrible demonio y descubre el tesoro que está enterrado profundo en su laje y lo trae de vuelta a la comunidad y lo distribuye. Eso es equivalente en el reino simbólico, en el reino narrativo, al espíritu que usa la palabra que confronta la mortalidad misma con espíritu elevado para generar el orden que es bueno. Todo eso se encaja en un pie, nada de eso es accidental.

• 1:06:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  Y la razón de eso es que es una reflección directa de lo que se captó en la imaginación sobre la estructura más profunda de la realidad misma.

• 1:06:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Y estamos en un punto en el desarrollo de nuestra cultura donde tenemos que empezar a entender estas cosas explícitamente y conscientemente para que podamos descubrir lo que significan.

• 1:07:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  "Y Dios dijo: "Haga que haya luz", y hubo luz.

• 1:07:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  "Y Dios vio la luz, que era buena, y Dios dividió la luz de la oscuridad". Eso es una representación de lo que podrías decir, es la forma más primordial de discriminación moral. Esa es una buena forma de pensar sobre ello.

• 1:08:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  Estas líneas contienen referencias a muchas cosas. La Biblia, técnicamente hablando, es un texto profundamente hiperlinkado. Casi todos los versos se refieren a múltiples otros versos. Y así cada línea poética está

• 1:08:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  al lado de una red asociada de

• 1:08:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  significados connotativos que amplifican el texto.

• 1:08:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  ¿Qué significa esto, pragmaticamente hablando?

• 1:08:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Mira, piensa en lo que haces cuando tomas una decisión.

• 1:08:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  Si no tienes ningún sentido en absoluto, al menos parte de lo que estás tratando de hacer es moverse hacia la luz o traer luz a la circunstancia, iluminar tu circunstancia. Y más que eso, en realidad estás tratando de dividir la luz de la oscuridad. ¿Qué significa eso? Bueno, ¿no piensas cuando tomas una decisión que estás tratando de averiguar lo correcto? Ahora, podrías fallar y podrías pensar: "¿Cómo puedo obtener lo que necesito ahora mismo de esta situación?" Ahora, no recomendaría eso como un patrón de abordaje estándar, porque

• 1:09:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  trae la tuya que serás, porque se trata de ahora mismo y hace que todos los demás sean subordinados a tu inmediato golpe, lo que hace que un dos años de edad haga. Y los niños de dos años no pueden vivir por ellos mismos, porque no puedes vivir con esa orientación. ¿Y entonces qué haces cuando tomas una decisión? Divides la luz de la oscuridad. Tratas de ver el camino hacia adelante que se desbordan y se desglean. Y puede que estés atento a eso debido a la responsabilidad de tomar tu cruz, así que se diga, que acompaña caminando por ese camino. Pero hasta el punto de que eres sabio en la menor de las guías,

• 1:10:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  intentarás separar la luz de la oscuridad y vivir dentro de la luz. Y la moral de esta notable historia de cuatro líneas hasta ahora es que en discriminar la luz de la oscuridad y en caminar ese camino, replicas el proceso que genera la realidad misma, la realidad que es buena, del caos de la posibilidad que se presenta.

• 1:10:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Aquí hay algo divertido para saber.

• 1:10:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  ¿Cómo sabes si estás haciendo eso bien?

• 1:10:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  Es significativo.

• 1:10:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  ¿Qué significa significativo? Es la más profunda de las instancias de orientación. La gente dice: "La vida no tiene sentido". Esto es lo que significan. En mi orgullo intelectual y presumptivo, he permitido la facultad crítica con la que estoy demasiado identificado criticar lo más valioso en mí fuera de la existencia.

• 1:11:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Eso no es una afirmación de virtud. Es una declaración de alianza con el espíritu más oscuro posible.

• 1:11:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  ¿Qué es Lucifer?

• 1:11:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  El espíritu presumptivo de la inteligencia orgullosa. El enemigo del espíritu de ser mismo. El espíritu que si permites que su residencia se haga dentro de ti, desmoronará tu capacidad de discriminar la luz de la oscuridad o te encarga de buscar y perseguir la oscuridad. Y no hay diferencia entre eso y el camino a el. Y no quiero decir eso en algún espacio trascendente lejos, aunque tal vez eso también sea verdad.

• 1:12:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Quiero decirlo como el consejo más pragmático y preciso posible que puede ser dado a cualquiera. Por lo tanto, su posición en las líneas de abertura del libro sobre el que nuestra cultura está predicada.

• 1:12:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  "Y Dios llamó el día, la oscuridad llamó la noche, y la noche y la mañana fueron el primer día. Más diferenciación. Que haya un permanente en medio del agua y que divida los aguas de las aguas". Esto es la construcción de lo que es concreto y fundamental de la posibilidad. Eso es lo que haces cuando conoces a alguien. Porque cuando no los conoces, no son nada más lo que podrían ser. Y ese es un reino infinito de posibilidades y permutaciones. Y mientras investigas y discriminas y persegues la luz o la oscuridad en relación con ellos,

• 1:13:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  los diferencias en una comprensión sólida. Y lo haces con todo lo que encuentras en el mundo. Y podrías decir: "Bueno, eso no tiene nada que ver con la creación de ser mismo". Y yo diría: "¿Cómo podrías construir la existencia de ser mismo en ausencia de un observador consciente?

• 1:13:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Ciertamente actúas como si tu experiencia fuera real. Por ejemplo, tu dolor es real. Que la realidad misma se constituye en consecuencia de tu experiencia consciente".

• 1:14:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  Tal vez eso sea verdad.

• 1:14:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  Actúas como si fuera verdad.

• 1:14:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  En tus interacciones con otras personas, cuando los tratas con el respeto que alguien hizo en la imagen de Dios, les gusta estar alrededor de ti. Si tratas a tus hijos de esa manera, prosperan. Si tratas a tu esposa de esa manera, desarrolla. Si tratas a tus amigos de esa manera, tienes amigos y no solo henchazos o personas con las que se divierten.

• 1:14:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  Cuando digo que actúas así, supongo que quiero decir que a medida que tu vida es exitosa y floreciente, la actúas. A medida que escuchas los mensajes que otras personas te envían sobre cómo quieren ser tratados,

• 1:15:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  la actúas.

• 1:15:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  A medida que la actúas, el mundo de posibilidades se abre a ti en una plenitud cada vez mayor. Por eso, en los Gospels, Cristo se presenta como el hombre que realiza el milagro de alimentar sin nada. Las patas y los peces.

• 1:15:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  El patrón que puede proporcionar en medio de la ausencia. ¿Qué es ese patrón?

• 1:15:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  ¿Qué tal tu reputación por la generosidad de productividad?

• 1:15:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  ¿Qué tal si te dirigías a nada más que eso? La generosidad de productividad que podrías ofrecer a otros.

• 1:15:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Si fueras un maestro en eso, ¿crees que nunca morirías? ¿Crees que las personas que amas nunca morirían? ¿No crees que en cambio las personas se rellenarían en tu hora de necesidad para servirte de la misma manera que te sirven a ellos? Ese es, por cierto, el tesoro que almacenas en el cielo que es preferido a todo tesoro terrenal. Ese es el árbol de gran precio que el sabio vende todo lo que posee para recoger. Y todo eso es una representación del patrón de la existencia que está integrado en las primeras ocho líneas de esta historia.

• 1:16:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  "Y Dios dijo: Que los aguas bajo los cielos se recogen juntas en un lugar para traer todo a una unidad que se concretiza. Y que la tierra húmeda sobre la que la vida puede surgir ocurra. La solididad, la fundación, la fundación sobre la que el sabio construye su casa".

• 1:16:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  "Y Dios llamó la tierra húmeda, la tierra, y la recogida de los aguas, él llamó los océanos". Y esa es otra representación de la separación del orden que es habitable del caos, el caos agudo que prevaleció en el comienzo del tiempo. El reino de posibilidad y potencial simbolizado por las profundidades oceánicas de las que se puede sacar mucha nutrición. Y Dios vio que era bueno. Ahora, eso es un indicio. Esa línea es repetida muchas veces en este texto.

• 1:17:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  ¿Qué es el orden que es bueno? Bueno, supongo que esa es la fundación para el Reino de los Cielos. Esa es una forma de pensar sobre ello. ¿Cómo participas en el proceso que trae al orden que es bueno?

• 1:17:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  ¿Cómo te diriges a lo bueno?

• 1:17:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Bueno, aquí hay un pensamiento para ti. Aquí hay una definición para aquellos de ti que abarcan pretensiones ateístas.

• 1:18:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  Imagina diez cosas buenas. ¿Qué comparten? Bueno, comparten lo que es en esencia bueno. Eso es lo que los unirá. La esencia de lo bueno es lo que unirá las cosas buenas.

• 1:18:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  Dios es la esencia de lo bueno.

• 1:18:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  ¿Crees en lo bueno? ¿Crees en la comunidad compartida de las cosas buenas? Bueno, entonces al mínimo tienes un Dios implícito te llamando. Y si tenías sabiduría, harías eso explícito y abrirías tu cuerpo a su invitación. A menos que no quieras lo bueno. Bueno, eso es lo que descubrirás.

• 1:18:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  Eso es lo que descubrirías si continuaras en el texto de la historia de Cain y Abel. Porque Abel decide perseguir el orden que es bueno.

• 1:19:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  Y Dios le recompensa con ese beneficio. Y Cain, en su tristeza y resentimiento y su desacuerdo de comprometerse, persigue el orden que es conveniente. Y la consecuencia de eso es que su sufrimiento se multiplica hasta el punto donde está depresivo y ansioso y triste y resentioso y hostil y nihilista y descastado y asesino y genocidal.

• 1:19:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Y esos son los pasos que divergen ante ti con cada mirada que tomas y cada decisión que tomas. ¿Arriba la escalera de Jacob? ¿Al lugar más alto posible? ¿O abajo dentro del infierno de Dante? ¿A las profundidades del infierno donde el traidor final vive siempre?

• 1:20:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  Muchas gracias.

• 1:20:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Thank you.

• 1:20:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  Alright, my dear.

• 1:20:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Thank you for putting up with that.

• 1:20:43Speaker 03

  How are you doing, bucko?

• 1:20:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, that was, you know, a very strange form of entertainment, but a form of entertainment nonetheless.

• 1:20:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  I liked your talk.

• 1:20:56Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:20:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, it was good.

• 1:20:58Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:20:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  Good work.

• 1:20:59Speaker 03

  Thank you, sir.

• 1:21:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yep.

• 1:21:01Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:21:04Speaker 03

  Cervantes wrote, "The road is always better than the inn. You're on the road again. Do you agree with Cervantes and what you have learned giving these talks?"

• 1:21:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Boy, that's a good question. I wish I could give a gold star to the person who asked that question. "The road is always better than the inn." Oh, man, that's such a great, that's such a great line.

• 1:21:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay. So, Dostoevsky wrote a very famous book called Notes from Underground, and in, Dostoevsky was an absolute prophet. Like Nietzsche, he could see way down into the structure of things, and he knew what was about to happen. He predicted the catastrophe of the communist revolution like sixty years before it happened, which is just a, it's absolutely unimaginable feat. He did that in a book called The Devils or the Possessed, and in many of his other books as well, not least in Notes from Underground. He, he, he was commenting on this building that, that was erected in London at the world's,

• 1:22:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  at, at the, at the, I think it was eighteen,

• 1:22:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  eighteen, late eighteen hundreds world exhibition. They built the first modern glass and steel building. It was called something like the Palace of Crystal, and it was, it was a vision of a kind of technological material utopia. And Dostoevsky got wind of this, and, and the utopian schemes that lay underneath it that turned our cities into modern day wastelands, by the way, the modern day wastelands of uniformed glass and steel. And he started to think deeply about the utopian offering.

• 1:22:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  So imagine that you just had whatever you need. That's the Marxist dream, I suppose. What do you need? Well, Dostoevsky thought, well, what are our basic requirements fundamentally? He said, "Well, imagine that you set up a situation," and I think he was speaking of California, "where all you had to do was sit in pools of bubbling hot water and eat sweet cakes and busy yourself with the propagation of the species." And that does sound a lot like Hollywood. And would that suffice?

• 1:23:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now, you'd think, "Well, that, in some way, that, that is everything I need, or maybe in some sense, even everything I desire."

• 1:23:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  So what's the problem with that? Well, Dostoevsky said, "Well, one of the problems is that people are basically insane and in a very curious way, and they'll break things into bits, even if they're good, just because they want something interesting to happen." And so if you provided a group of people with this garden of hedonistic delights, it would take no time at all until they smashed it into pieces just so they could squabble interestingly among the ruins and curse. And that's very funny and very accurate, and that was Dostoevsky's observation, and that was a devastating critique of the presumptions of materialist utopians.

• 1:24:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  And the reason for that is, that's not what we want, and the reason for that is, we're not overgrown infants. And that's an infantile vision of paradise. You can just lay there, someone will change your diapers because you don't want to have all of the inconvenience of actually having to move when an intravenous flow into your veins could provide you with everything you need. Maybe you don't even have to be conscious.

• 1:25:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, is that what you want?

• 1:25:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, if that isn't what you want, what do you want? How about the great adventure of your life? How about that? In the story of Abraham, Abraham is an overgrown infant, he's a failure to launch, he's like seventy something years old. He lives in his dad's tent or his mother's basement, and you know, he's got food, he's got grapes, he's got slave girls, he's, or pornography. He's got everything he needs at hand, needs, at hand. He's got privilege. And it's undeserved, but there's no need for him to do anything, so what does he lack? How about the need to do something?

• 1:25:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  How about that? How about, how about that that's the need that becomes paramount in the land of material plenty? The call to adventure. Well, that's what comes to Abraham, that's what comes to Abraham. That's how God is defined as the,

• 1:26:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  that is how God is defined in the story of Abraham. The biblical corpus is a sequence of stories that contain within them a definition of God. And so you might say, one manner that you could conceptualize God is the, God is the manifestation of the spirit within that calls you to broaden yourself in the, in the, in the, in the struggle with life. It's a definition, do you understand? It's not a proclamation of faith. It's a definition of the highest possible aspiration. Well, now then you ask yourself, ask yourself this. Do you believe in the existence of a spirit that calls you to adventure?

• 1:26:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, if you pursue adventure, then yes.

• 1:26:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  Ask yourself this, then, if you devoted yourself to nothing but that pursuit wholeheartedly and with full faith, how great an adventure could you have? Well, that's what God offers Abraham, and Abraham says, "I'm in no matter what." And God says, "Okay, then, how about if I call upon you to sacrifice your son?" And Abraham says, "I'm all in

• 1:27:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  no matter what." And that's the ultimate statement of faith, and it's a necessary statement because whether you like it or not, you are all in no matter what. And you can either do that in the most noble possible manner,

• 1:27:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  or you can do it as a second raider. And those are your options. And if you do it as a second raider, all that means is that you have faith in being second rate. And good luck with that. And I would say that too, good luck with that, and why? Because life is far too

• 1:28:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  brutal, far too overwhelming, far too magnificent, far too demanding for you to master it without committing sacrificing the very best within you.

• 1:28:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  And then you might ask yourself too, "Life is a veil of suffering."

• 1:28:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Maybe it's because you don't make the right sacrifices. Now, let's think that through for a minute. When you look back in your life and you're, and you're happy with yourself, I don't mean prideful, I don't mean puffed out, maybe you don't even discuss this with anybody, I mean, when you're having a colloquy with your conscience and you're trying to decide if there's anything within you of redeeming value whatsoever,

• 1:29:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  what might you point to? How about a time in your past where you encountered something remarkably difficult and managed it with dignity, grace,

• 1:29:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  and productive generosity? Even once or twice, when you stepped out of your way to do something for someone else, not to gain the credit, the public credit in relationship to your reputation for doing so, but because you were moved by the spirit that pushed you to extend yourself beyond your limits. And that contemplation of those acts can get you through a very dark time. Well, what if your life was made of nothing but those acts?

• 1:29:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  Maybe there would be no truly dark times. Maybe you would be able to construe whatever came your way, no matter how horrific as

• 1:30:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  an immense dragon with a commensurate potential reward.

• 1:30:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's what happens in the story of Job, Job is tortured almost to the same degree as Christ, and Job's insistence during his torment is, "No matter what happens to me, I will not lose faith." And that's a decision. It's a proclamation, right? It's an orientation, and the orientation is,

• 1:30:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  "Be set by catastrophe, though I may be, I will maintain faith in the fundamental goodness of being and myself. And I will act in accordance with that proposition, and I will take whatever comes my way in consequence of that faith." In dire straits, one faith or another will move you forward.

• 1:30:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  The

• 1:30:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  traditional injunction is to maintain your faith in the ultimate goodness of being, becoming, and the human soul.

• 1:31:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  And that's why the road is better than the inn, because we're not built for comfort.

• 1:31:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  We're built for adventure.

• 1:31:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  We're built for the adventure of the truth, to be more precise.

• 1:31:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  So that's that.

• 1:31:38Speaker 03

  This year, this year, my teenage brother has come out as a woman. I'm the only one in the family that doesn't call him by his new name. What should I do?

• 1:31:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, I would say, don't fall prey to the machinations of toxic compassion.

• 1:32:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  Leave here.

• 1:32:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Imagine 10 years from now, and

• 1:32:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  your brother and you have the best relationship you can imagine, and things have worked out for him.

• 1:32:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Act in, act towards him in accordance with that spirit.

• 1:32:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  That doesn't mean do what he wants you to do in the moment. Establishing a proper relationship never means doing for someone what they only want in the moment. That is the worst thing you can do to your children. You act in accordance with what's good for them

• 1:32:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  across the widest possible range of circumstances and times. And that's how you entice them into maturity. And so you need a vision, you need a vision of the relationship you could have with your brother. You could tell a story, a bit, about your

• 1:33:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  decision and determination to establish an appropriate relationship with your father and your siblings. Just tell that briefly, what you did and what happened.

• 1:33:20Speaker 03

  Uh, well, my sister and I, both my sisters and I, they're much older than I. They're five and seven years older than me. And we've always, uh, since I've been grown, we never seemed to get along much. And as my mom was diagnosed with dementia, Jordan tested us and we found out that my oldest sister, at 49, was showing signs of dementia. And I said to Jordan, what do you think I could do to improve my relationship with my sister? And he said, you could just listen, just listen. And so I stopped talking to her. I'd stopped telling her any of my opinions, anything that I thought about. I just listened. And that weekend went a lot better. I got in a lot less trouble.

• 1:34:07Speaker 03

  Surprise, surprise. And at the end of the weekend, we were sitting having dinner with her, and she started to tell me what she thought of me. And she started to say things like, you never did anything on your own. Mom and dad, um, you were spoiled. They did everything for you. Your life was easy. And I didn't say anything, because that was what I decided. And at the end of that, she said, but you're a good mother. And I thought, that was very strange. And over the years, that was in 2002. Over the years, we've gotten along much, much better, because I continued to listen. And we, and she didn't bring that up again, except for once. Other than that, we got along fine.

• 1:34:52Speaker 03

  And so, uh, I would recommend trying that with anyone that you have a difficulty with their relationship with you is just listen, because you're not talking to who you think you are. And she had an old memory, you know, that she had never updated. And she was talking to me about something from the past. But once she said it, she realized that, oh, actually, I was grown and I was a good mother. And none of that was really true. So I think that's a

• 1:35:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, so what happened in that situation is you stopped trying to impose your will on your sisters in all ways. She stopped looking for respect. She stopped looking for love. She stopped looking for attention. She flipped the game. She decided that she was going to aim at reconciling with her sisters. That was the aim. And then, then she was going to watch and listen to see how the pathway to that would make itself manifest. Now, this is so cool. Here's something that's really worth understanding. That's how your perceptions work. You're an aiming mechanism.

• 1:36:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so

• 1:36:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  once you establish an aim,

• 1:36:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  you lay an interpretive filter on the world that only lets through those things that will move you towards that aim and those things that will stop you and that hides everything else. And so the way the world makes itself manifest to you perceptually is literally dependent on your aim. And so if you aim at reconciliation, let's say, in, in the case of the questioner, you want what's best for your brother and for your relationship, and then you wait and watch the pathway forward to that will make itself available. Now, how do I know that?

• 1:36:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, don't you ever get where you're going? Well, how? Well, the way you get where you're going is you decide what your destination is. And then you see the pathway and the facilitators and the obstacles. And so

• 1:37:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  this is such a powerful

• 1:37:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  approach that other people will fall under its spell. So if we meet and I want to understand who you are and I have that goal uppermost in mind and I attend to you carefully, you will tell me who you are, one way or another.

• 1:37:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  And that's why it says in the Gospels, for example, that if you knock, the door will open, and if you ask, you'll receive, and if you seek, you'll find. And you think, well, there's no way the world can be constituted like that. It's like, if it wasn't constituted like that, you'd never receive if you asked, and you'd never find if you sought. And that isn't how it works. And so if your aim is

• 1:38:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  pure and your heart is in the right place, you'll find your way with your brother. And you can wait. You know, you can wait until that way makes itself manifest. You don't have to push it. You can't push it. It's not up to you anyways. The best you can do is

• 1:38:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  hope you can help him find his way. And the best way that you can help anyone find their way is by aiming at what's highest in relationship to the two of you. And then

• 1:38:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  allowing that process to unfold insofar as you're able to facilitate it.

• 1:38:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  And there's a kind of grace and dance with that. And one of the advantages of that too is you won't be crushed by an excess of responsibility, because you might be tearing out your hair, thinking, oh, my God, you know, what should I do with my brother? And the answer is, well, if you don't know, recalibrate your aim and wait and wait.

• 1:39:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  The right time will make itself, the right time will make its appearance. The right words will come to mind. You can feel them as you move along. Something you learn to do as a clinical therapist, you know, if you're listening to people constantly, you want to find the right question to draw them out further. You want to ask them the right question to clarify what they've told you, to seek further understanding. And you can feel those questions bubbling up inside you in relation. Those are the tools that are making themselves manifest to you to attain your aim. The aim, I told my clients, the aim, I told my clients when they came to see me, well, what's my aim here with you? My aim is to have the best in me serve the best in you. And that doesn't mean I'm always going to be on your side.

• 1:40:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right? Because sometimes the part of you that will be speaking will be your worst enemy. And I'm not a fan of that. And that's not what you want from someone who's a friend, and certainly not from someone who's a counselor or a brother. Now, you're in the terrible circumstance of trying to weave your way forward in an incredibly complicated moral landscape, but

• 1:40:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  get your aim straight and don't lie. And, and, and act in love, and that's a good start. And you'll,

• 1:40:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  even if you're the guy who's wrong for five years in everyone's minds, that doesn't mean you'll be the guy that was wrong 15 years from now.

• 1:41:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  What's the most important thing I can do to take care of my wife?

• 1:41:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  I didn't make that up. Try to remember that you love her.

• 1:41:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  But I really mean that. By remember, I mean,

• 1:41:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  bring that to mind. Imagine that, rekindle it. You know, like, people wonder what it means to experience the grace of God. And

• 1:41:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  you could imagine that that's the same question as, what does it mean to receive inspiration from within? That's a good analog. Well, love is a form of grace. You fall in love. Right? You don't, it's not something you do to yourself. It's something that comes over you. And I said, it's associated with a vision. It's associated with a vision of heaven itself, essentially. That's really what it is. It's a portal to heaven itself. And it's an offering.

• 1:42:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  But it's,

• 1:42:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  it's a spirit that descends that has to be made welcome.

• 1:42:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Else it depart.

• 1:42:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  You have to practice it.

• 1:42:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  Like, love is a practice. It's not in its first stages because it's grace. It's offered to you with no effort on your part, or little effort, or maybe even despite yourself to some degree. But the maintenance of love is a practice. And it's best if it's a conscious practice, and you can practice it. You could do this. Your husbands, do this like 10 minutes a day. Practice loving your wife. Just pretend that you love her. You know, and in that game, you'll rediscover that spark, and then it'll be there. And then maybe you'll only be able to practice that 15 minutes once a week to begin with, but maybe then it'll be like 20 minutes a day. And then maybe it'll be an hour a day, and then maybe it'll be 90 minutes a day.

• 1:43:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  And, you know, maybe you could spend the rest of your life trying to make it 12 hours a day. And maybe you could do that, you know? And then every day would be the perfect date.

• 1:43:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  Every day would be the date you imagined you might have once. And if you aim at that,

• 1:43:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  there's a reasonable probability that you'll make your wife happy.

• 1:43:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Thank you very much, everyone.

• 1:43:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  Thank you, my dear. You're welcome. Thank you.

• 1:44:04Speaker 01

  There's something about fall that changes the rhythm of your evenings. The sun starts going down earlier, the nights get a little cooler, and suddenly staying in with a good buck and getting to bed in a reasonable hour sounds pretty great. And lately, I've genuinely been looking forward to getting into bed because I've been sleeping on the Thermo Balance Elite from Brooklyn Bedding. It's comfortable, supportive, and designed with temperature-regulating materials that help keep you cool and comfortable throughout the night. The more time I spend sleeping on it, the more I've appreciated just how much thought Brooklyn Bedding puts into making a great mattress. Every mattress is designed and assembled in their Arizona factory with quality materials and real American craftsmanship. And if you're ready to make your own bedroom a little more inviting this fall, Brooklyn Bedding gives you a 120-night comfort trial to make sure you find the right fit.

• 1:44:46Speaker 01

  Go to brooklinbedding.com and use my promo code PREY at checkout to get 30% off site-wide during the fall sale, exclusive with my code. That's brooklinbedding.com and promo code PREY for 30% off site-wide. Support our show and let them know we sent you in the survey after checkout. Brooklinbedding.com, promo code PREY.

• 1:45:04Speaker 02

  Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. The message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird. Okay, one judgment.

• 1:45:22Speaker 02

  Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch.

• 1:45:26Speaker 03

  Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate for three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com. Everyone wants healthcare to be simpler and easier. That's why UnitedHealth Group is fast-tracking more than 60% of children's procedures that used to need pre-approval. So more kids get the care they need when they need it. And speeding up procedure approvals and payments for more than 1,500 rural hospitals, so they can focus on caring for their communities. And that's just the start. Learn more at uhd.com/access.