The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories
The Paradoxically Curative Power of Peterson’s Message Part III
“The earliest books of our Bible are astrological, and are filled with priceless ancient wisdom told in myth, fable, and allegory.”
E. Valentia Straiton (The Celestial Ship of the North)
In 1999, I briefly worked for the first company that attempted to host a live online video broadcast of a Victoria Secret pageant. It was an epic fail. 20 years later, I’m confident that if Jordan Peterson sells tickets for live online viewers of his Exodus lecture series in May 2019, he may break the Internet. Maybe we are making progress after all. For the past year, I’ve been wading through Peterson’s work. His Biblical Series was popular, but I just wasn’t interested. I couldn’t imagine the material being engaging.
It turns out, I was wrong. Focusing on the psychological aspect immunizes you from all the silliness and distraction that literal or historical interpretations get you into. The literal and historical context is unbelievably helpful if you think about telling these stories to children or more primitive societies. But, literal interpretations also open themselves up to the territorialization of the knowledge for a privileged class of knowledge bearers.
“If you read history from the perspective of the perpetrator, and take on the suffering of the world as your personal problem, you’re giving yourself the opportunity to realize the full depth of your being.”
Like a magician going through a long drawn out performance, is Peterson actually ‘Jesus Smuggling’? ‘What’s this?’, the rabbit pops out of the proverbial hat, ‘Jesus is the answer’. Is he intellectually rationalizing a worldview to fit his religious doctrine? He says no, his analysis is ground-up, multi-layered and meticulously supported by Biology and Psychology. The ‘Jesus Smuggle’ charge though, could be a useful dismissal for those that don’t want to delve into the depth and complexity of his work.
We all seem to have been trained to think in terms of black and white. Dismissing stories that have been with us since Sun (Son) Worship as a ‘mind virus’ or ‘global manipulation’, throws the baby out with the bath water. It’s lazy thinking. If we can poke one hole in Religion, or hierarchy or Capitalism, or Freud or Jung or Nietzsche, we don’t need to turn the mirror on the inadequacy of our own understanding and our own limits to explain the successful aspects of the phenomenon.
Lie #3 — If I don’t understand it, it must be both dumb and wrong.
Lie #3 is not surprisingly very close to Milton’s findings in his search across cultures for the definition of the concept of evil. We’re trained to explain things away instead of the more challenging striving to understand the complexity, and embrace the nuance & mysteries.
Evil is the force that believes that its knowledge is complete and that it can do without the transcendent. As soon as it makes that claim, it instantly exists in a place that’s indistinguishable from Hell. It could get out merely by admitting its error, and it will never do that.
Jordan Peterson paraphrasing John Milton’s findings on cultural definitions of Evil
At the Psychological level, Peterson’s talks took on a whole new meaning and significance. The experience of journeying through these stories with Peterson was akin to defragging my boot code. Evolutionarily, the Biblical journey now makes sense and is even deeply curative, serving as a stabilizing and aspirational cultural software patch. The stories evolve from shocking and explicit early on, toward and more and more subtle and psychologically abstract as the stories proceed. These tired old tropes have been worn out by people who clearly now, only know how to mouth the words.
When I hear Peterson explaining the concept of ‘The Logos’, I can’t help but imagine a mathematical interpretation. ‘The Logos’ seems like an integration function, integrating your own unique experience. Like a farmer’s combine, you are navigating a field of order and chaos. You are separating the wheat from the chaff with the blade of truthful speech, while leaving your inadequacies behind (outdated ideas, relationships, attachments). Appropriately, farmers use the non-nutritional straw left behind as bedding for their stock. Wine-from-water or present-from-future, are other meaningful analogues.
A world of useful interpretation opens up to you If you look at the Jesus story, or the Genesis stories as the-word-made-flesh. When read as a guideline that’s embodied in a real-life story, it becomes a bearing point to navigating chaos, and a means for making sense of malevolence.
In our own personal Hero Journey, we are confronting the unknown (biting the apple), realizing we’re ignorant (naked), letting go of our insufficiencies (fall), climbing Jacob’s ladder of competence & mastery and arriving a more integrated person (walking with God). Once you become masterful across many journeys, you achieve Joseph’s multicolored coat (mastery of the meta journey).
As the Jules Ezekiel quote in Pulp Fiction, you are constantly walking the tightrope in your own personal ‘Arc of the Covenant’ between the ‘inequities of the selfish’ (lost in the desert — new age) and ‘the tyranny of evil men’ (Tower of Babel).
In a psychological interpretation, ‘God’ becomes the ideal that you’re striving for or the best version of your future self. ‘Sacrificing your son to take on the suffering of the world’, is the very antithesis of today’s Coddling of the American Mind. We are to be raising our children to be the next JFK. We’re supposed to be realizing our depths and mastering our own personal Hero Journey. Instead, we’re arguing about safe spaces and trigger words.
Resolve then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tinny blasts on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us. Forward!
— Walt Kelly, June 1953
Neil McDougall is a global nomad expat father of two, who believes our shared reality is our shared responsibility.
Originally published at www.synthesismeaning.me on November 17, 2018.
