2017 Personality 07: Carl Jung and the Lion King (Part 1) - VoiceTube: Learn English through videos!

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