Thank you all very much for coming. It’s really shocking to me that you don’t have anything better to do on a Tuesday night. Seriously though, it’s very strange, in some sense, that so many of you are here to listen to a sequence of lectures on the psychological significance of the Bible stories. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, but it still does surprise me that there’s a ready audience for it. That’s good. We’ll see how it goes.


I’ll start with this, because it’s the right question: why bother doing this? And I don’t mean why should I bother—I have my own reasons for doing it—but you might think, ‘why bother with this strange old book at all?’ That’s a good question. It’s a contradictory document that’s been cobbled together over thousands of years. It’s outlasted many, many kingdoms. It’s really interesting that it turns out a book is more durable than stone. It’s more durable than a castle. It’s more durable than an empire. It’s really interesting that something so evanescent can be so long-living. So there’s that; that’s kind of a mystery.


I’m approaching this whole scenario, the Biblical stories, as if they’re a mystery, fundamentally because they are. There’s a lot we don’t understand about them. We don’t understand how they came about. We don’t really understand how they were put together. We don’t understand why they had such an unbelievable impact on civilization. We don’t understand how people could have believed them. We don’t understand what it means that we don’t believe them now, or even what it would mean if we did believe them. On top of all that, there’s the additional problem—which isn’t specific to me, but is certainly relevant to me—that, no matter how educated you are, you’re not educated enough to discuss the psychological significance of the Biblical stories. But I’m going to do my best, partly because I want to learn more about them. One of the things I’ve learned is that one of the best ways to learn about something is to talk about it. When I’m lecturing, I’m thinking. I’m not trying to tell you what I know for sure to be the case, because there’s lots of things that I don’t know for sure to be the case. I’m trying to make sense out of this, and I have been doing this for a long time.


You may know, you may not, that I’m an admirer of [Nietzsche](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche). Nietzsche was a devastating critic of dogmatic Christianity—Christianity as it was instantiated in institutions. Although, he is a very paradoxical thinker. One of the things Nietzsche said was that he didn’t believe the scientific revolution would have ever got off the ground if it hadn’t been for Christianity—and, more specifically, for Catholicism. He believed that, over the course of a thousand years, the European mind had to train itself to interpret everything that was known within a single coherent framework—coherent if you accept the initial [axioms.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom) Nietzsche believed that the Catholicization of the phenomena of life and history produced the kind of mind that was then capable of transcending its dogmatic foundations, and concentrating on something else. In this particular case, it happened to be the natural world.


Nietzsche believed that Christianity died of its own hand, and that it spent a very long time trying to attune people to the necessity of the truth, absent the corruption, and all that—that’s always part of any human endeavour. The truth—the spirit of truth—that was developed by Christianity turned on the roots of Christianity. Everyone woke up and said, or thought, something like, ‘how is it that we came to believe any of this?’ It’s like waking up one day and noting that you really don’t know why you put a Christmas tree up, but you’ve been doing it for a long time, and that’s what people do. There are reasons Christmas trees came about. The ritual lasts long after the reasons have been forgotten.


Nietzsche was a critic of Christianity, and also a champion of its disciplinary capacity. The other thing that Nietzsche believed was that it was not possible to be free unless you had been a slave. By that, he meant that you don’t go from childhood to full-fledged adult individuality: you go from child to a state of discipline, which you might think is akin to self-imposed slavery. That would be the best scenario, where you have to discipline yourself to become something specific, before you might be able to reattain the generality you had as a child. He believed that Christianity had played that role for Western civilization. But, in the late 1800s, he announced that God was dead.


You often hear of that as something triumphant, but, for Nietzsche, it wasn’t. He was too nuanced a thinker to be that simpleminded. Nietzsche understood—and this is something I’m going to try to make clear—that there’s a very large amount that we don’t know about the structure of experience—that we don’t know about reality—and we have our articulated representations of the world. Outside of that, there are things we know absolutely nothing about. There’s a buffer between them, and those are things we sort of know something about. But we don’t know them in an articulated way.


Here’s an example: You’re arguing with someone close to you, and they’re in a bad mood. They’re being touchy and unreasonable. You keep the conversation up, and maybe, all of a sudden, they get angry, or maybe they cry. When they cry, they figure out what they’re angry about. It has nothing to do with you, even though you might have been what precipitated the argument. That’s an interesting phenomena, as far as I’m concerned, because it means that people can know things at one level, without being able to speak what they know at another. In some sense, the thoughts rise up from the body. They do that in moods, images, and actions. We have all sorts of ways that we understand, before we understand in a fully articulated manner.


We have this articulated space that we can all discuss. Outside of that, we have something that’s more akin to a dream, that we’re embedded in. It’s an emotional dream, that we’re embedded in, and that’s based, at least in part, on our actions. I’ll describe that later. What’s outside of that is what we don’t know anything about, at all. The dream is where the mystics and artists live. They’re the mediators between the absolutely unknown and the things we know for sure. What that means is that what we know is established on a form of knowledge that we don’t really understand. If those two things are out of sync—if our articulated knowledge is out of sync with our dream—then we become dissociated internally. We think things we don’t act out, and we act out things we don’t dream. That produces a kind of sickness of the spirit. Its cure is something like an integrated system of belief and representation.


People turn to things like ideologies—which I regard as parasites on an underlying religious substructure—to try to organize their thinking. That’s a catastrophe, and what Nietzsche foresaw. He knew that, when we knocked the slats out of the base of Western civilization by destroying this representation—this God ideal—we would destabilize, and move back and forth violently between nihilism and the extremes of ideology. He was particularly concerned about radical left ideology, and believed—and predicted this in the late 1800s, which is really an absolute intellectual tour de force of staggering magnitude—that in the 20th century hundreds of millions of people would die because of the replacement of these underlying dream-like structures with this rational but deeply incorrect representation of the world. We’ve been oscillating back and forth between left and right ever since, with some good sprinkling of nihilism and despair. In some sense, that’s the situation of the modern Western person, and increasingly of people in general.


I think part of the reason that Islam has its back up with regards to the West, to such a degree—there’s many reasons, and not all of them are valid—is that, being still grounded in a dream, they can see that the rootless, questioning mind of the West poses a tremendous danger to the integrity of their culture, and it does. Westerners, us—we undermine ourselves all the time with our searching intellect. I’m not complaining about that. There isn’t anything easy that can be done about it. But it’s still a sort of fruitful catastrophe, and it has real effects on people’s lives. It’s not some abstract thing. Lots of times when I’ve been treating people with depression, for example, or anxiety, they have existential issues. It’s not just some psychiatric condition. It’s not just that they’re tapped off of normal because their brain chemistry is faulty—although, sometimes that happens to be the case. It’s that they are overwhelmed by the suffering and complexity of their life, and they’re not sure why it’s reasonable to continue with it. They can feel the terrible, negative meanings of life, but they are sceptical beyond belief about any of the positive meanings of it.


I had one client who’s a very brilliant artist. As long as he didn’t think, he was fine. He’d go and create, and he was really good at being an artist. He had that personality that was continually creating, and quite brilliant, although he was self-denigrating. But he sawed the branch off that he was sitting on, as soon as he started to think about what he was doing. He’d start to criticize what he was doing—the utility of it—even though it was self-evidently useful. Then it would be very, very hard for him to even motivate himself to create. He always struck me as a good example of the consequences of having your rational intellect divorced, in some way, from your Being—divorced enough so that it actually questions the utility of your Being. It’s not a good thing.


It’s really not a good thing, because it manifests itself not only in individual psychopathologies, but also in social psychopathologies. That’s this proclivity of people to get tangled up in ideologies, and I really do think of them as crippled religions. That’s the right way to think about them. They’re like religion that’s missing an arm and a leg, but can still hobble along. It provides a certain amount of security and group identity, but it’s warped and twisted and demented and bent, and it’s a parasite on something underlying that’s rich and true. That’s how it looks to me, anyways. I think it’s very important that we sort out this problem. I think that there isn’t anything more important that needs to be done than that. I’ve thought that for a long, long time—probably since the early ‘80s, when I started looking at the role that belief systems played in regulating psychological and social health. You can tell that they do that because of how upset people get if you challenge their belief systems. Why the hell do they care, exactly? What difference does it make if all of your ideological axioms are 100 percent correct?


People get unbelievable upset when you poke them in the axioms, so to speak, and it is not by any stretch of the imagination obvious why. There’s a fundamental truth that they’re standing on. It’s like they’re on a raft in the middle of the ocean. You’re starting to pull out the logs, and they’re afraid they’re going to fall in and drown. Drown in what? What are the logs protecting them from? Why are they so afraid to move beyond the confines of the ideological system? These are not obvious things. I’ve been trying to puzzle that out for a very long time. I’ve done some lectures about that that are on YouTube. Most of you know that. Some of what I’m going to talk about in this series you’ll have heard, if you’ve listened to the YouTube videos, but I’m trying to hit it from different angles.


Nietzsche’s idea was that human beings were going to have to create their own values. He understood that we had bodies, motivations, and emotions. He was a romantic thinker, in some sense, but way ahead of his time. He knew that our capacity to think wasn’t some free-floating soul, but was embedded in our physiology, constrained by our emotions, shaped by our motivations, and shaped by our body. He understood that. But he still believed that the only possible way out of the problem would be for human beings themselves to become something akin to God, and to create their own values. He talked about the person who created their own values as the [Overman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cbermensch), or the Superman. That was one part of the Nietzschean philosophy that the Nazis took out of context and used to fuel their superior man ideology. We know what happened with that. That didn’t seem to turn out very well. That’s for sure.