"We're much more complicated than we understand, which means that the way that we behave contains way more information than we know and part of the dream that surrounds our articulated knowledge has been extracted... it is a bit of reciprocal control but there's manifestations of spirits, so to, speak inside you that determine the manner in which you walk through life, and you don't control it and what it does."

This video clip comes from Professor Peterson's: "Biblical Series I: Introduction to the Idea of God"

Lecture I in Jordan Peterson's Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories series from May 16th at Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto. In this lecture, Jordan Peterson describe what he considers to be the idea of God, which is at least partly the notion of sovereignty and power, divorced from any concrete sovereign or particular, individual person of power. he also suggests that God, as Father, is something akin to the spirit or pattern inherent in the human hierarchy of authority, which is based in turn on the dominance hierarchies characterizing animals. 

I also spent a lot of time reading Carl Jung. It was through Jung and also John Piaget's developmental psychologist that I started to understand that our articulated systems of thought are embedded in something like a dream and that dream is informed in a complex way by the way we act.

So, you know, we act out things we don't understand all the time, and if that wasn't the case then we wouldn't need a psychology or a sociology and anthropology, or any of that, because we would be completely transparent to ourselves, and we're clearly not so. We're much more complicated than we understand, which means that the way that we behave contains way more information than we know and part of the dream that surrounds our articulated knowledge has been extracted.

As a consequence of us watching each other behave and telling stories about it for thousands and thousands and thousands of years extracting out patterns of behavior that characterize humanity and trying to represent them, partly through limitation, but also through drama and mythology and literature and art and all of that to represent what we're like, so that we can understand what we're like and I see in it the struggle of humanity to arise, to rise above this animal forebears say and to become conscious of what it means to be human.

And, that's a very difficult thing because we don't know who we are, what we are, where we came from or any of those things. And, you know, the wild life is an unbroken chain going back three and a half billion years. It's an absolutely unbelievable thing every single one of your ancestors reproduced successfully for three-and-a-half billion years. It's absolutely unbelievable. We rose out of the dirt and the muck and here we are conscious but not knowing, and we're trying to figure out who we are.

Freud, I suppose, in some sense, started to collate the information that we had. Pertaining to the notion that people lived inside a dream. You know, it was Freud who really popularized the idea of the unconscious mind, and we take this for granted to such a degree today that we don't understand how revolutionary the idea was like with what's out with Freud is that we've taken all the marrow out of his bone so to speak unless the husk behind. And, you know, now, when we think about Freud we just think about the husk because that's everything that's being discarded but so much of what he discovered is part of our popular conception now, including the idea that your perceptions and your actions and your thoughts are all, what would you say, informed and shaped by unconscious motivations that are not part of your voluntary control and that's a very strange thing.

It's one of the most unsettling things about the psychoanalytic theories that the psychoanalytic theories are something like you're a loose collection of living subpersonalities each with its own set of motivations and
perceptions and emotions and rationales all of that, and you have limited control over that so you're like a plurality of of internal personalities that's loosely linked into a unity. You know, that because you can't control yourself very well which is one of Jung's objections to Nietzsche's idea that we could create our own values. So, he didn't believe that, especially not after interacting with Freud, because he saw that human beings were affected by things that were deeply affected by things that were beyond their conscious control and no one really knows how to conceptualize those things.

You know the cognitive psychologists think about them in some sense as computational machines. And the ancient people, I think, thought of them as gods although it's more complex than that like lage would be a God Mars. The regard of rage that's the thing that possesses you when you're angry. It has a viewpoint and it says what it wants to say and that might have very little to do with what you want to say when you're being sensible. And it doesn't just inhabit you, it inhabits everyone and it lives forever, and it even inhabits animals and so it's this transcendent psychological entity. That inhabits the body politic like the thought inhabits the brain. That's one way of thinking about it a very strange way of thinking but it certainly has its merits, and so and those things well in some sense those are deities although it's not that simple and so Jung.

Jung was got very interested in dreams that he started to understand the relationship between dreams and myth because he would see in his clients dreams echoes of stories that he knew because it was deeply read in mythology. And, then he started to believe that the dream was the birthplace of the myth, and that there was a continual interaction between the two processes the dream and the story and storytelling. And, well, you know, you tend to tell your dreams as stories when you remember them.

And, some people remember dreams all the time like two or three at night. I've had clients like that and they often have archetypal dreams that have very clear mythological structures. I think that's more the case with people who are creative by the way especially if they're a bit unstable at the time because the dream tends to occupy the space of uncertainty and to concentrate on fleshing out the unknown reality before you get a real grip on it. So, it's like the dream is the birthplace of thinking. That's a good way of thinking about it, and so because it's the birthplace of thinking, it's not that clear. It's doing its best to formulate something that was Jung's notion.

As opposed to Freud who believed that there were sensors internal sensors that were hiding the dreams true message that's not what Jung believed. He believed the dream was doing its best to express a reality
that was still outside of fully articulated conscious comprehension. It was because you think. Look! A thought appears in your head, right? That's obvious bang. It's nothing you ever asked about but what does that mean, a thought appears in your head. What kind of ridiculous explanation is that? You know, it just doesn't help with anything where does it come from. Well, nowhere! It just appears in my head. Okay, well, that's not a very sophisticated explanation as it turns out you know and so you might think that those thoughts, thoughts that you think, where do they come from?

They're often someone else's thoughts right someone long-dead that might be part of it just like the words you use to think are utterances of people who be long dead, and so you're informed by the Spirit of your ancestors. That's one way of looking at it, and your motivation speak to you, your emotions speak to you, and your body speaks to you, and it all does all that at least in part through the dream, and the dream is the birthplace of the fully articulated idea.

Anyways, back to Jung, Jung was a great believer in the dream and I know that dreams will tell you things that you don't know, and then I thought how can that be, how that in the world can something you think up tell you something you don't know. How does that make any sense?

First of all, why don't you understand it? Why does it have to come forth in the form of the dream? It's like you're not. There's something going on inside you that you don't control right the dream happens to you just like life happens to you. I mean, there is the odd lucid dreamer who can apply a certain amount of conscious control but most of the time it's you're laying there asleep, and it's crazy complicated world manifests itself inside you and you don't know how you could, you can't do it when you're awake
and you don't know what it means? What is going on? And, that's one of the things.

That's so damn frightening about the psychoanalyst because you get this both from Freud and Jung, you really start to understand that there are things inside you that are happening, that control you instead of the other way around. You know, it is a bit of reciprocal control but there's manifestations of spirits, so to, speak inside you that determine the manner in which you walk through life, and you don't control it and what it does. Is it random? You know, there are people who have claimed that dreams are merely the consequence of random neuronal firing which is a theory. I think it is absolutely absurd because there's nothing random about dreams, you know, they're very structured and very complex and they're not like snow on a television screen or static on a radio like those things are complicated and then also I've seen so often that people have very coherent dreams that have a perfect narrative structure.

Now, they're fully developed in some sense, and so I just deny that theory just doesn't go anywhere with me, I just can't see that as useful at all and so I'm more likely to take the phenomena seriously.

Say, there's something to dreams. While you dream of the future and then you try to make it into a reality, that seems to be an important thing. Or maybe, you dream up a nightmare and try to make that into a reality because people do that too. If they're held and revenge for example and full of hatred and resentment. In that manifests itself in terrible fantasies you know those are dreams then people go act them out
these things are powerful, you know, when whole Nations can get caught up in collective dreams. That's what happened to the Nazis Germany in the 1930s. It was absolutely remarkable, amazing, horrific, destructive, spectacle and the same thing happened in the Soviet Union. The same thing happened in China, like we have take these things seriously, you know, try to understand what's going on.

Jordan Peterson, What do your dreams tell you about yourself?, Essential Truth, accessed on August 28, 2020.