Bible Lecture #8

Study Notes
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Discussion thread for The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories - Lecture #8 and Lecture #8 Introduction

study group discussion

Discussion as part of our Study Group.

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my notes

The disappearance of God

  • As God fades away in biblical stories, individual becomes stronger and stronger.

Disrespecting your “father”

  • If you lose respect for the spirit of the father that will transform you into a slave.

    • << I have no idea what this means. What exactly is meant by slave here ? Whose slave ? >>

    • << Criticizing westreal civilization without any gratitude. >>

    • Criticism as tool to separate wheat from the chaff.

  • Don’t capitalize on others weakness.

The Tower of Babel - social structure as a threats instead of nature (like in the flood story)

  • If you think God is going something despicable, it’s your job as a reader to assume that he is right and try to figure out the reason why ?

    • << Exercise 8.1: Build Empathy: When you hate someone for their actions - assume that they are right and try to figure out the reason why ? >>

  • Paradise Lost was written to justify ways of God to man.

  • Satan as an intellectual figure.

    • Rationality as the highest angel in the heavens.

    • << **Exercise 8.2: **Introspection: Think if you are intellectually arrogant where you think there is nothing beyond rationality and your knowledge/opinion is perfect.

      • Intellect falls in love with it’s own creation. And if you do that you immediately occupy hell.

        • << What and in which manner do one occupy this hell ? What does he mean by this ? >>

  • Australian authors book on how it’s better if being never existed at all.

    • << Which book is that ? >>

  • 2008: The idea that some companies are too big to fail - actually they are so big that they must fail.

  • The dangerous of overgrown social systems.

    • Social Engineering

      • Be very careful about doing large scale experiment because of the hidden complexity. Feedback loop is too long for you to see effects of your experiment.

      • Start small and in your competence domain.

        • Start with yourself and your family first.

          • If you can’t put them in order - what makes you think you can put the world in order.

      • People don’t see God because they don’t look down enough - Jung.

    • << **Exercise 8.3: **What can you change yourself that you have been avoiding for a long time ? >>

  • Marx’s idea that wealth would be in hands of few and few people.

    • It is true for all creative production. (Matthew Principle).

      • Can be predicted from the same equation as used in distribution of gas.

    • The people on the top are not the same people across time, only the proportion is same.

    • What happens if you bring this socialist utopia ?

      • People only have to worry about having fun and procreation.

        • People themselves will smash the system just so that something interesting can happen.

          • << I don’t agree with this. >>

      • Economist’s article on rise of nationalism.

        • To bring all that multiplicity under one umbrella - top is so far from the bottom that people are not able to relate to it.

Abraham’s story

  • Jill Bolte Taylor analyzing her own stroke.

  • Aldous Huxley’s experiments

  • Right brain is general consciousness and left is your specific one.

  • Timothy Francis Leary

  • Book recommendation:** **

  • Carl Jung’s education

    • How did Jung come up with all those insights ?

      • Thinking in words, images, and words + images.

      • Openness - ideas and aesthetics.

  • Lucid dreamer asked a dream character and she was told she would need to visit a slaughterhouse if she is to be successful at the university.

    • Slaughterhouse nature of existence was bothering her a lot.

    • Find out what they are afraid and you gradually and voluntarily expose them to it.

    • << Exercise 8.3: Figure out what scares you and try to face it. >>

  • Be careful of the wisdom you haven’t earned (from a paper by Carl Jung).

  • How to induce different consciousness states ?

    • Physical

      • Fasting, Dancing, Isolation

  • Psilocybin: Dr. Roland Griffith, Stephen Ross et. al.

    • Not every has the experience but the ones who do describe it as one of the most profound in life.

    • People who don’t have the mystical experience don’t have the personality transformation.

    • Trait openness was increased by one standard deviation.

    • 10% change of a trip to hell.

    • 85% success in smoking cessation.

  • Overwhelming stress and anxiety are mistakenly called depression.

  • Dostoevsky and his mystical experiences.

  • Fundamental myth

    • Oedipus myth

    • Successful hero myth

  • Documentary: Crumb

    • Story of his escape from his dreadful mother.

    • Only film JBP has seen that captures Freudian pathology.

  • Q&A

    • Borderline personality disorder

      • People who can plan but can’t execute at all.

      • 0 correlation b/w consciousness and intelligence.

    • Consciousness evolved so that large groups can exist.