Joe Rogan - Jordan Peterson: You Must Rescue Your Father From the Belly of the Whale

So I figured something out that I thought I'd tell you about. This took me like 30 years to figure out and I figured it out on this tour. So there's this old idea you know that you have to rescue your father from the belly of the whale right from some monster that's deep in the abyss. You see that in Pinocchio for example but it's a very common idea and I figured out why that is I think. So imagine that we already know from a clinical perspective that you know if you set out a path towards a goal which you want to do because you need a goal and you need a path because that provides you with positive emotion right. So you set up something as valuable so that implies a hierarchy. You set up something as valuable. You decide that you're going to do that instead of other things so that's kind of a sacrifice because you're sacrificing everything else to pursue that and then you experience a fair bit of positive emotion and meaning as you watch yourself move towards the goal and so the implication of that is the the better the goal the the more full and rich your experience is going to be when you pursue it. So that's one of the reasons of that's one of the reasons for developing a vision and for fleshing yourself out philosophically because you want to aim at the highest goal that you can manage. Okay so you do that and then what you'll find is that as you move towards the goal there are certain things that that that you have to accomplish that frighten you. You know maybe you have to learn to be a better speaker a better writer a better thinker you have to be better to people around you or you have to learn some new skills and you're afraid of that whatever because it's going to stretch you if you if you pursue a goal and it's and so that'll put you up against challenges. Okay so all the clinical data indicates well the opposite of safe spaces as Jonathan Haidt has been pointing out that what you want to do when you identify something that someone is avoiding that they need to do because they're afraid you have them voluntary can voluntarily confront it and so you break it down what you try to do if you're a behavior therapist is you break down the thing they're avoiding into smaller and smaller pieces until you find a piece that's small enough so they'll do it and it doesn't really matter as long as they start it you know then they can put the next piece on in the next piece and what happens is they don't get less afraid exactly they get braver they get they it's like there's more of them and you can and here's why so imagine you do something new and that's informative right there's information in the action and then you can incorporate that information and turn it into a skill and turn it into a transformation of your perceptions so there's more to you because you've tried something new so that's one thing but the second thing is and there's good biological evidence for this now that if you put yourself in a new situation then new genes code for new proteins and build new neural structures and new nervous system structures same thing happens to some degree when you work out right because your your muscles are responding to the load but your nervous system does that too so you imagine that there's a lot of potential you locked in your genetic code and then if you put yourself in a new situation then then the stress that's the situational stress that's produced by that particular situation unlocks those genes and then builds new parts of you and so that's very cool because who knows how much there is locked inside of you okay so now here's the idea so let's assume that that scales as you take on heavier and heavier loads that more and more of you you get more and more informed because you're doing more and more difficult things but more and more of you gets unlocked and so then what that would imply is that if you got to the point where you could look at the darkest things so that would be the abyss right that would be the deepest abyss if you could look at the harshest things like the most brutal parts of the suffering of the world and the malevolence of people and society if you could look that look at that straight and and directly that that would turn you on maximally and so that's the idea of rescuing your father because imagine that you're like the potential composite of of all your all the ancestral wisdom that's locked inside of you biologically but that's not going to come out at all unless you stress yourself unless you unless you challenge yourself and the bigger the challenge you take on the more that's going to turn on and so that as you take on a broader and broader range of challenges and you push yourself harder then more and more of what you could be turns on and that's equivalent to transforming yourself into the ancestral father into all because you're you're like the what would you call it you're the consequence of all these living beings that have come before you and that's all part of your biological potentiality and then if you can push yourself then all of that clicks on and that turns you into who you could be that's and that's the re-representation of that positive ancestral father so that's why you rescue your father from the belly of the beast so you think that this ultimate goal of sacrifice and of risking your life in order to save someone who's truly important to you that this somehow or another maximizes your potential as a human being well i think i think you can think about it religiously too so you think about it this way so in the christian story for example you have christ does two things that are messianic one is takes the suffering of the world onto himself because that's a weird idea okay so what does that mean let's think about it psychologically well maybe it means that well that's your job is the world's full of suffering and you should accept that as your responsibility past present and future you're supposed to do something about that as much as you can about it and maybe you start with your own localized suffering you know put yourself together but then you expand that outward and you decide that it's you're not a victim of that even though you know you're part and parcel of it but you're you're the potential solution to that and so you accept that as a responsibility so that's part of taking on a load that's part of bearing a cross you could look at it that way the cross is sort of a symbol of the place of maximal suffering okay so you accept that as a challenge not as a not as something that you're victimized by maybe you accept that as the price of being okay so that's one that's one responsibility you're responsible for addressing the suffering in the world so that could give you some meaning seemed to me then the next thing is there's a story of course that christ met the devil in the desert and so that's the encounter with malevolence so that would be the other thing because the two major problems that people face obviously are suffering tragedy and malevolence and so that's the other thing that you're responsible for is that you're supposed to look at the capacity for human evil as clearly as you possibly can it's a very terrifying thing you know that causes post-traumatic stress disorder in people that aren't accustomed to it and in the mythology that's associated with the encounter with evil it's almost always the case that the entity that does the encountering even if it does it voluntarily is is is hurt by it so the egyptian god Horace for example who's the eye and the falcon the thing that can see and pay attention when he encounters his evil uncle Seth who's the precursor of satan he loses an eye because it's no joke to encounter malevolence you know it can really shake you but the idea would be that if you can face the malevolence and you can face the suffering then that maximally that opens the door to your maximal potential and then the opt the optimistic part of that is and this is this is why it's so useful to peer into the darkness let's say the optimistic part of that is is that although the suffering is great and the malevolence is is deep your capacity to transcend it is stronger so what you get out of the most negative viewpoint is the most positive possible consequence because one of the things you'd like to know if you wanted to know something deep about yourself is that you could face the worst that there wasn't prevail and i believe that's capable i believe that's i believe that that people are capable of that i think that despite how tragic life is and how malevolent things are that fundamentally our spirit let's say has the capacity to to confront that and to fix it like psychologically so to confront it courageously to be able to bear up under that if you do it voluntarily but also to address it not only to deal with it psychologically but to deal with it practically and that we could make things much better