---
id: COUNCIL_2026-08-21_maps-of-meaning-06-of-12
title: Maps of Meaning Lecture 6
category: Lecture Summary
predicted_narrative_arc: Influence to Personal Application
sentiment: Inspired
emotions:
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- motivated
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keypoints:
- Peterson's work on literacy as escape from self-tyranny and historical repetition
  of manna lesson leading to new tyrants
- Connection between ancient patterns like Marduk and Babylonian tower to current
  AI superintelligence risks
- Lecture covers hierarchical gods, attention, self-sacrifice, Big Five traits, memory
  systems, and meta-story of order-chaos-rebirth
- Human uniqueness in voluntarily transforming perceptual frames rather than fixed
  domains
- Building curated knowledge base from influencers like Peterson to create minion-like
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summary: User reflects on Jordan Peterson's Maps of Meaning Lecture 6 as a key influence
  shaping their knowledge base and personal project. They connect ancient mythological
  patterns of tyranny and dependence to modern AI development and biblical prophecy.
  The lecture content is positioned as foundational for building a storytelling akrasia
  buster system that serves as training wheels for personal growth through council
  or witness.
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- testing
- gratitude
- anxiety
- reverence
- warmth
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- maps-of-meaning
- jordan-peterson
- mythology
- neuropsychology
sycophancy: 2
truth_score: 7
entropy: 6
updated: '2026-08-24T23:11:25Z'
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prefix: COUNCIL
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pipeline_filename: COUNCIL_2026-08-21_maps-of-meaning-06-of-12.md
proposed_topic: Wisdom
lane: Wisdom
corpus_topic: Wisdom
---

Maps of Meaning Lecture 6
#Agents of Transformation

In lecture six, we learn how human consciousness and society are organized through the integration of religious symbolism, social hierarchies, and neuropsychological structures. We examine how individuals and cultures structure value—from ancient Mesopotamian deities to modern psychological frameworks—and how humans often enact patterns of wisdom before fully understanding them. The discussion delves into our core memory systems and how brain hemispheric specialization enables us to navigate between order and chaos. Dr. Peterson posits a uniqueness fundamental to humans—that rather than mastering only fixed domains, our neurological architecture equips us to engage with transformation itself. He concludes by highlighting how our brains' emphasis on hands, eyes, and speech reflects our unique capacity as active explorers and world-shapers, capable of revising the very principles by which we live.

## Key Takeaways

- **Hierarchical Structures in Society and Mythology**: Ancient societies organized value hierarchies through amalgamation of tribal gods (e.g., Marduk with 50 names). The highest god embodies multifaceted attention and transformative speech — a precursor to monotheism.
- **Attention and Redemption**: Gods like Marduk and Horus represent paying vigilant attention. Redemption comes through awareness and seeing corruption clearly, not willful blindness.
- **Unified Value Structure = Mental Health**: A coherent societal value hierarchy aligns individuals psychologically and socially. "There's no sanity in an insane society."
- **Self-Sacrifice as the Foundation of Society**: Figures like Buddha and Christ exemplify voluntary self-sacrifice for the greater good. Individual redemption requires collective redemption; society cannot be "just about you."
- **Highest Aim: Service to What is Highest**: The ideal society emerges when everyone strives for exhaustive service to the highest good, rather than power or self-interest.
- **Big Five Personality Traits**: Extroversion (positive emotion), Neuroticism (negative emotion), Agreeableness (empathy vs. competitiveness), Conscientiousness (orderliness/industriousness), Openness (creativity/ideas). Self-consciousness is a facet of neuroticism.
- **Overcoming Self-Consciousness and Social Anxiety**: Shift focus from "How am I doing?" to serving others or the function of the situation. Proper aim eliminates misery from self-focus.
- **Three Memory Systems**: Procedural (skills, embodied — intact in patient H.M.), Episodic (images of past), Semantic (propositional/verbal). Children learn procedurally before they can represent or explain.
- **Implicit Knowledge in Dreams and Social Shaping**: Dreams reveal patterns shaped by social feedback — an ideal pattern of who you should be. Conscience = deviation from this ideal; calling = pull toward it.
- **Progression of Knowledge**: Procedural → Play → Ritual → Drama → Myth → Religion → Literature → Philosophy. Imitation of admirable, transformative action drives this upward.
- **The Meta-Story**: Stable order → Anomaly → Chaos/Underworld → Reconfiguration → Better order/rebirth. Mastering transformation (not just a fixed domain) is the highest mode of being.
- **Human Uniqueness**: We alone can voluntarily transform our foundational games/perceptual frames, escaping Malthusian limits. Trust and integrity are the ultimate "natural resources."
- **Neuropsychology of Chaos and Order**: Right hemisphere = novelty/anomaly/unexplored territory (dreams, fantasy). Left hemisphere = routine/explored territory (language, efficiency). Beware over-routinization — efficiency on the wrong path is dangerous.
- **Homunculus and Human Essence**: Brain prioritizes hands, mouth/tongue, eyes/face. We confront the world as active manipulators and communicators — explorers mastering chaos through skilled action and speech.

## Society and the Highest God

So, what's the organization? Well, here's how society is organized. In ancient Mesopotamia, the highest god, Marduk, had 50 names. Why? Well, in all likelihood, he was an amalgam of all the tribal gods that had aggregated when this civilization started to emerge. And so, each of those tribes had their own deity structure, and then they would come together, and then they'd have a war about whose god was on top.

And that war was partly, sometimes, a war because men are the playthings of the gods. But it was also often a debate and a conceptual debate and a rearrangement and an amalgamation, so that the positive aspects of this god would be associated with the positive aspects of that god, and a new abstraction would come forward. And then maybe there's collaboration between 50 different tribes.

And this is what happened in Mesopotamia. A god emerges from the panoply of gods that's the highest god. And in the Mesopotamian case, that was the god Marduk. And Marduk had eyes all the way around his head. So he was kind of like Horus, the Egyptian god, because he could see everywhere and would. And he spoke the magic words that would transform day into night. So there's an early representation of the doctrine of the word there, the creative word.

But what's the point? Pay attention. That's one point. And then speak the words that redeem. The Mesopotamians figured out, in their panoply of gods, that that was the god that dominated all other gods. And that was a major step towards a sophisticated monotheism, like a genuine monotheism. What should rule? What should rule over everything else?

In the Lord of the Rings, it's the ring of power, right, on the dark side, and that's exactly right. But on the good side, well, for the Mesopotamians, it was multifaceted attention and the ability to speak transformative words. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. For the Egyptians, Horus, it was the eye that was awake that could see the corruption of the king that was aware.

The Egyptians formally realized that the state corrupts. So the king becomes anachronistic and subject to overthrow by his evil brother when he becomes anachronistic and willfully blind. Closes his eyes instead of attending. Horus is the redeemer in the Egyptian pantheon, and he redeems by paying attention.

And so, societies come together by hammering on a structure of value until all of the pieces are nudged and tapped into alignment, from the very bottom of things all the way to the top. And then, the people who inhabit that unified structure are unified in their psyche, as well as being unified socially. And that's the right way of conceptualizing mental health. There's no sanity in an insane society.

## Enlightenment and Self-Sacrifice

So when the Buddha reaches enlightenment, he reaches enlightenment after a multitude of trials, a multitude of sacrifices, a multitude of disciplinary rituals, including starvation. He starves himself, the story goes, so intensely that a grain of rice would stick out in his neck. Intense yogic exercise, intense discipline, and then meditation under the Bodhi tree.

And then invitation into the domain of the gods to nirvana, and then rejection of nirvana because everyone else was not ready to receive it, and a return to the world to spread the news, to pull everyone along, because there's no individual redemption without redemption of the whole. That's the idea, right? And that's part of that self-sacrificial ethos that the proper state is founded on.

That's why Christ is a universal savior, is that the pattern of voluntary self-sacrifice is the redeeming principle of psyche and state by necessity. It's the definition of society itself, because if it's about you, it's not society. And so then the question is: How do you establish that harmony? And the deepest religious idea is something like, exhaustive service in the service of what's highest.

Well, what kind of society would you like to inhabit? If people took that notion seriously, then everyone would be striving to make everything as good as it could be all the time. That seems to be—What would the alternative be? Power? "Do what I say, or else." Well, that's a principle, and you can organize for a while on it. Everybody gets what to do, what they want, all the time, no matter what. Well, you can do that for a while, too, but not for very long. And the consequences aren't good.

And so, you know, if you're in a marriage, what do you do? You serve the spirit of the marriage. If you're a parent, you serve your children, now and in the future. And if you're a family, you serve the community. And the community serves the state and so on, all the way up the hierarchy. And then your life has meaning, because why? Why? Why? Well, it's difficult, it's challenging, it develops you.

## Personality Dimensions

So here's something very interesting. Psychologists did statistical analysis on word groupings to determine personality categories. So, for example, if you're extroverted, you tend to be assertive. You tend to smile a lot, you tend to be happy, you tend to be outgoing. And so all those things clump statistically. So if you're one of them, you tend to be all of them. That's positive emotion dimension.

Negative emotion, the same way. If you tend to be angry, you tend to be sad, you tend to be in pain, you tend to be anxious. All the negative emotions have a common trunk. That's neuroticism. That's the second personality dimension. Empathy, warmth, compassion, versus competitiveness, brusqueness, harshness, and what would you say? Judgmental discrimination. That's agreeableness. That's another dimension.

Conscientiousness. Orderliness and industriousness. Patriotism goes along with that. Reliability. It's the best predictor of workplace performance outside of IQ. Openness. That's a creativity dimension. You can be open in the realm of art. You can be open in the realm of ideas. They correlate, but they're somewhat segregatable. Those are five dimensions.

Self-consciousness loads on neuroticism so strongly that they're not distinguishable. In fact, one of the cardinal measures of the Big Five personality dimensions, which is called the NEO PI-R, has self-consciousness as a facet of neuroticism. What does that mean? Think about yourself and suffer. Right. Now, that is something worth knowing.

## Social Anxiety and Self-Consciousness

So one of the things I used to tell my clients who had social anxiety, these are ones who had the social skills. I had clients who were socially anxious because they had no idea how to behave. They didn't know how to shake hands. They didn't know how to say their name. They couldn't talk on the phone. They didn't know how to introduce themselves. They never had any friends. No one ever paid any attention to them.

So they were built from the bottom up. It's like, "here's how you shake hands." Look at the person. Use a grip something like theirs. Match their tempo. Pay attention. Ask them their name, tell them yours. Practice that 25 times with me, so you know what you're doing, because you can't even get the ball rolling. So that's behavioral, building it from the bottom up.

I had other clients who were socially anxious because they, well, they'd just lose their social ability because their anxiety would overwhelm them. They'd go to a party and they'd think, "What are these people thinking about me? Now, how are they evaluating—am I coming—what am I doing here? What are people thinking about me?" Maybe they smoke, maybe they drink to quell their anxiety. What's the problem?

They should have been trying to make the other people feel at ease. Right. Because that's what you do if you're socially skilled. And if you fall down that pit of self-consciousness, it's nothing but misery. And so that's so much worth knowing. If you're on stage, you're lecturing, and you start thinking about how you are doing, you're done. You'll get self-conscious, you'll turn red, you're naked on the stage, you'll stumble. Same with any performance.

And it's because your aim is wrong. It's not about you. It's not about you in that narrow, local sense. If you're lecturing, if you're on stage, and it's about you, well, first of all, you're never going to have an audience. And second, it's just going to be a matter of misery, right? You should be serving the function of the performance, whatever that happens to be. And that's the same with whatever you do. So if you're self-conscious, you should ask why. What desire is possessing you? And you can replace that by service. And that's very effective. So that's really worth knowing.

## Integration of Psyche and Society

So, as a society integrates, as a psyche integrates, the disjunctions between the aims are eradicated, and the whole system is tapped into a kind of integrated purpose, stretching from the bottom all the way to the top. As you mature, your purview of that increases. Because when you're young, you can only see what's obvious. And it takes wisdom to start to understand what's higher and what's subordinate and to see the whole picture. But the whole picture is always there. And if you're optimizing your function, then you pay attention to the entire structure insofar as that's possible.

## Memory Systems

OK, this is complicated. It hasn't been complicated so far. You have three memory systems, as it turns out. You have a memory for skill. I'll give you an example. There is a famous patient, H.M., who had epilepsy. And epilepsy often occurs because of a malfunction in a brain area called the hippocampus. And the hippocampus is the brain area that moves short-term attention to long-term memory. So it's crucial. If the hippocampus is damaged, you live in the present.

So H.M. had neurosurgery, and they took out both hippocampi. And so he lived in an eternal present from then on. However, there are certain tasks he could learn, even though he didn't know he learned them. So for example, you remember the child's game Operation? OK, so touch the edges, and it buzzes. Psychological researchers have designed analogs of Operation. The star maze is one of them. So it's a star that's inscribed in metal. The space between the metal edges is about a quarter of an inch.

Imagine a flat metal plate, this engraved star, quarter of an inch wide. Now you have a stylus that's electrified, and you run the stylus through the star, and if you touch an edge, it buzzes. And so if you practice, you can get very good at this and you can zip through it without buzzing. H.M. could learn to do that as fast as a person with memory intact. But every time he saw the task, he thought it was new.

Why? Because the memory system that subserves skill, like movement, is not the same memory system that tracks it in perception. There's actually two of those. There's one that does that with images. So that's the declarative system. Sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Procedural memory. Procedural memory is skill. That's how you ride a bike. That's how you ski. That's how you walk. You can't tell someone how to ride a bike. What do you tell them? Sit on the bike, balance, and pedal. Well, what's that? That's useless, right?

That gives them a very low-resolution, iconic picture. But they have to do it. They have to learn to balance. They have to learn to move. And then that's instantiated in patterns of neural connection and strengths of connection. It's not a representation. It's an embodied, it's an embodied skill. Tennis players hit a ball back before they see it.

I'll give you another example of this. I'm going to do something like this. OK, watch. This is called a ballistic movement. OK, so, the time it takes me to move my arm when I do that is shorter than the time it takes the message to move from my arm and back. So I have to organize that whole movement before I execute. Now, it feels to me like I stopped my hand voluntarily, but that's not what happens. I set up a chain of neurological impulses to execute the ballistic movement.

In some ways, that's what you're doing when you're walking, because when you're walking, you're actually falling forward. You can take people with spinal injuries who are paralyzed, and if you hoist them up over a treadmill, tilt them forward, their legs will walk. It's a spinal reflex. So, skill is built into your body—the ability to walk, the ability to dance, the ability to ski. You never really forget it because it's really become part of you. That's procedural memory. That was intact with H.M.

Declarative memory, that was gone. And declarative memory is usually what we think of as memory. That's the memory that you can use to bring back a movie from the past or to state a set of propositions that you remember. That's declarative memory. It's got two elements—episodic, that's more like image, an episode; and semantic, which is the translation, you could say, of an episode into words. And so, those are forms of memory. And that's how we represent our knowledge of the world.

So, one form of knowledge about the world is knowledge of how to act, how to dance, for example, how to look at someone, how to modulate your voice, all these complex things that are embodied. Piaget noted that children learn procedure before they learn representation. So, for example, if you take school children, especially young ones, and they're all playing a game—marbles is one of the games that Piaget studied.

And he studied that because he knew that games were a microcosm of society, that society was actually a game. And so, he was very interested in how children learn to play games together, because that's a little society, and how that evolved and transformed and became more sophisticated until they became adults. So that was the reason for that. Very brilliant.

And he noted that, if you got eight, seven-year-olds together, they could play marbles, and the game would go pretty smoothly. It was like the collective of seven kids had the rule structure, but they didn't—if you took the kids out individually and you asked them what the rules were, they got a lot of disparate responses. So the kids would learn to play before they knew how to say what they were doing.

Well, obviously, because a child learns how to walk before he can tell you how to walk. And a child learns all sorts of things at the procedural level that there's no way he has the philosophical capacity to explain—and you're exactly the same way. There's all sorts of things you know how to do. You don't know how to represent them. Not at all. That's why we have to think. That's why we have a psychology, right? That's why we're a mystery to ourselves.

## Dreams and Implicit Knowledge

Now, the upshot of that is, and this is—see, I tried to figure out. I spent a lot of time in the psychoanalytic literature, learning how to interpret dreams. And dreams can teach you things that you seem not to know. And so then the question arises, it's like: How the hell can you dream something you don't know? Where does that come from exactly? And so, people, archaic people, certainly thought of dreams as a place where the divine revealed itself. And that's a reasonable supposition, but it still begs the question, where does the knowledge come from?

OK, so, when you're communicating with someone, they're rewarding and punishing you continually, by their direction of attention, by the intensity of their gaze, by their connection to what you're saying or not saying, by their dance with you. And everyone's doing that to you, constantly. And so, they're shaping your behavior in ways that you don't understand at all. And that shaping has a pattern.

You know how it is when you disappoint someone you love? OK, so what is happening there? Well, they have an ideal pattern that you're supposed to be mimicking, that you've drastically deviated from, and that's manifested in their disappointment. The question is, what is that pattern? What are people looking for when they're interacting with you?

Well, one thing they're looking for, for sure, is whether or not you can listen. And that's a magical skill, man. If you listen to people, they'll tell you what they want. And that's really something because then you could, in principle, deliver it. And so, if you want to be popular and successful, listening, that's a hyper-useful skill. Well, what does listening mean? It means attending. It also means attending to them.

If you're a salesman, sales gets a bad rap, and that's because there are crooks who are salesmen, but there are crooks in every enterprise, and you have to sell. Well, if you're a wise salesman, you make relationships because you don't want to sell to someone once. "I sold something to that sucker. And then he figured it out and he told all his friends, and that was the end of my career."

You want to talk to the person. You got to think, "OK, do you have a problem that's bothering you? Is there something that's bothering you? And do I have a solution to that?" And if the answer is no, well, then you had a particularly delightful conversation about what's on the person's mind, and you learn a lot more about their enterprise, and maybe you figure out a solution later. But you want to find out, do you have something to offer? And if you do, well, then you can offer it. But you can't do that until you listen.

And then if the solution that you have works and solves the problem, well, then you've established a relationship that's based on trust and you have a repeat customer. And if you do that with 100 people, then you're phenomenally successful. And so that's a much more effective sales strategy. It's like, do I have something you need that I could offer? Is there something we could do together?

You're wise if you do that, because the last thing you want to do, if you have any sense, is to establish a relationship with someone that's based on an initial falsehood. Because how the hell are you going to make that work? If you're not the customer for my product, you'll only be miserable and unhappy if you purchase it. And all you'll be is a headache, and then you'll tell everybody about it. Right. So, you could listen.

OK, so why am I telling you this? Because people are conspiring constantly to shape you. Right. And that means there are ways that you embody a pattern that's much deeper than you know. Now, this is partly a consequence of us being social. Imagine a wolf pack. The wolves know this comparative status of the members. They really know it. Primates are the same way.

So, if you take green monkeys, I think it was green monkeys, and you take pictures of all the green monkeys in the troop, and you show the monkeys the photographs, they'll look longer at the high-status individuals. It's just like People magazine. It's hilarious. Well, why? Well, because the monkeys need to pay attention to the high-status individuals because: mess with their children, and look the hell out, for example.

And these status positions appear to be quite hereditary and long-lasting. And so, relative position in the social group is an unbelievably important thing for a primate to know, including us. There's almost nothing more important than comparative reputational status. And people will game that. That's what psychopaths do, and con artists; they game the reputational hierarchy.

OK, so what's the essence of reputation? What's the essence of valid reputation? In a functional society, that's what people are hoping for from you. Now, what that means is that there's a pattern that's playing out, that's at the bottom of all your social interactions. And that's the pattern of who people would want you to be, if you were the best that you could be.

Imagine now a wolf pack becomes declaratively conscious of the fact that they have a status hierarchy. Before that, they know. But what does it mean they know? It's procedural. They act it out. So, one wolf will roll over and show his neck when challenged by a dominant wolf. He makes himself into a voluntary prey animal. And then the dominant wolf will act out predator, but forestall tearing out the throat.

Well, why? Well, how about because you need the wolf, you need the lesser wolf to bring down the next moose. So, even if you're a dominant wolf, obsessed by power, you're bounded by the appreciation for the value of your compatriot because you're a collective hunting pack. Very relevant to human beings. So, the wolves act out status, and they act out reputation, they act out competence, they act out forbearance, they act out mercy, they act out cooperativeness.

But they have no concept of those terms. There's no representation of that, right, in imagination. Well, we don't know. They dream, and we don't know how they think; maybe they think in images, if they think. Who knows if they think; they might just act. Highly probable.

We're hierarchical and we represent it. So that means that our dreams are full of the patterns that other people are teaching us. Right. Right. So that's why we can derive information from our fantasies and our dreams. It's like, there's a storehouse of—it's like a large language model. A lot of people have told you who you should be, verbally and non-verbally, not just in direct interactions, but in books, in movies. And there's just a panoply of representations of how you should be.

And there's an essence to that, a coherence to that. And you could say that that essence is a religious image. That's a good way of thinking about it. And you could say that your deviation from that ideal is the voice of your conscience. And anything that makes itself manifest in your life that pulls you towards that ideal, that's a calling. That's just to say that you're actually a social creature.

Why wouldn't you be pulled in the direction of operating properly in the social environment? It's the very definition of being social. Of course, you have that instinct. Otherwise, you wouldn't be social. You'd be a grizzly bear, out for its own purposes; a solitary animal. That's not us. And so we're called upon to deliver. We have images of what's being requested.

And you can tell when someone acts out that image because you'll go to them for advice voluntarily in a crisis. And that's how elders function, by the way, in most human societies. They're not the top, dominant, chest-beating primate. They're the people who everyone turns to in a time of crisis. They're wise. And so, OK.

## Progression of Knowledge

So, what does this imply? This is how knowledge progresses. Procedural first, you act it out. Then you dream it. Then you interpret the images. And then you make it explicit. And the procedural domain is way wider than the image domain, and the image domain is way wider than the semantic domain. And so the dream, that would be the realm of art, all things considered, the realm of great images, like the image of William Blake's painting that we saw.

There's an immense realization in that single image. It's taken me six hours to explain part of what that image means. And you can see it in a glance. And religious iconography, great deep art, is full of the images of strategies and procedures that we approximate and act out and abstract, and yet don't fully embody.

Here's another way of thinking about it. Children play house. So there's rules to the game. So let's say a house game proceeds between a little boy and a little girl. It's a very common occurrence. What's the first step? Invitation. The little girl has to want to play. Maybe you should figure that out when you're four, so you remember. Right. So the invitation has to be proffered and accepted voluntarily. That sets the stage for play.

OK, and then there's some negotiation as to role. "You be the mommy, and I'll be the daddy." OK. And maybe you vary that. "You're going to be the cat, and I'm going to be the sister," whatever. The game will change, depending on what role we want to embody, procedurally, act out. OK. So now you might say, well, a child, a boy who's being the father, is imitating the father. But that's not right, because kids are way more sophisticated than that.

If I imitated you, I would sit like that, right? That's imitation. So I'm directly using my body to replicate the stance of your body. But when a child is playing father, he's not directly imitating his father, even in memory. This is what he's done instead. It's so sophisticated, it's mind-boggling. Imagine the father is a pattern across instances of fatherhood. So you see your father interacting with your mother, and you see your father interacting with your sister, and interacting with you, and at mealtimes.

And there's a pattern across all of those instances. And then you see that pattern represented in fairy tales, in what you're being read to and what you watch on TV, and you abstract out a pattern of the father. What's that? That's the spirit of the father. And that's what you imitate. You put that into procedure. You act it out. And so that's what the child is trying to do, is to incorporate the spirit of the father in play. And so that's an embodied and dramatic ritual. It's practice.

That's what the play is for, so that it becomes a skill, like an automated skill, not a representation. Now, the representation might go along with it, but usually not until much later. And so people can act out. Why am I saying this? People can act out things that are deep beyond their comprehension. And they do that all the time. What are you doing at a stadium? You're worshiping the ability to hit the aim. And more than that, collectively, hierarchically, in competition, bounded by a set of principles, in unison with everyone else.

So that when a particularly skillful player, who's also a particularly good sport, performs something remarkable and hits the target under impossible conditions, everyone leaps to their feet like one thing. Right. Do people know that? Well, it depends on what you mean then by "know". They act it out, they wear the jerseys, they worship the heroes. They're obviously compelled by the aim and the goal.

Would they understand it as a general rule at that level of description? No. Would they see the concordance between that and how you conduct yourself in the world broadly or how your perception is structured? No. But it grips them, right? It unifies them. And so, we're obviously wise beyond our understanding because we don't understand ourselves. So there's more to us than we know, by a lot.

And partly, the religious enterprise, the enterprise we're engaged in here, is to lay out the pattern. Because it would be so lovely if who you embodied and how you represented yourself and how you spoke were the same thing. You could think about that as the aim of, the aim of civilization itself is to bring all those things into unity, so that not only do we do, we know.

And so, part of the fracture of the West at the moment is that our religious systems are abstractions of our procedural wisdom, but we don't understand that. And so, we criticize them without knowing what they represent. And then that puts a fracture between who we're called to be and how we understand the world. And then we're houses divided against themselves, and those do not stand. And so, we're weak in the face of opposition and we question the validity of our culture. It's very, very dangerous. We'll be fortunate if it doesn't destroy us.

We need to know what's at the bottom or at the top, and remember. So, how does this lay itself out? Someone does something creative. Everybody imitates it. That's formalized in play. Play formalized is ritual. Ritual can become drama. Drama, aggregated and abstracted, that becomes myth. Myth analyzed becomes religion. Religion assessed and differentiated becomes literature. Literature and religion assessed becomes philosophy.

So, these are layers and layers of knowledge that, at least in part, manifest themselves from that bottom up. What's the impetus? The original impetus is the imitation of some transformative—some strikingly transformative and courageous operation, procedure. You want to imitate the most daring player in a game. You want to imitate the player who is most skilled, but who stretches their skills to the utmost degree. That's a compelling source of admiration.

Admiration is the grip of the instinct to imitate. Toward what? Toward mastery. Of what? What's known, skill, and what's unknown. Right. You see someone who's a master at that, they're compelling. You imitate. Children do that. And then we've, we've attempted, across the years, in our analytic, the decades, the centuries, to assess analytically the structure of that pattern. And that's what we'll investigate as we move forward.

## The Meta Story

OK, here's the meta story. So this is the complete story. Remembering that each of these structures has this nested nature. Stable state, predictable routine, established game, emergence of anomaly, collapse, dwelling in the underworld. Now you know what the underworld is. Dwelling in the underworld, picking up the pieces, reconfiguring the body, putting things back together after they've fallen apart.

Reconstitution of a new game. A better game is a game that does everything the previous game did, plus some more. That's the definition of better. It masters more territory. That gives you an upward impetus. The reconstitution of a new game. The reestablishment of a new identity and an improved identity. And so, that's death and rebirth. That's the fall and redemption. That's the fundamental pattern of the meta story. And the meta story is the fundamental pattern of literature.

The story is, I was here and I went there, and this is how. But the adventure is, I thought I was there and I thought I was going there and I started to move, and things fell apart, and it wasn't so good. And I learned a lot, and it was awful. Everything came back together. And now I'm thankful for the catastrophe. Right, right, right. So the meta story is the story of how the simple story transforms and improves. And that's a better story. It's the generative mechanism of stories itself.

We asked at the beginning of this sequence, how do you master chaos? By mastering the process of transformation. An ordinary person inhabits a fixed realm, like the shepherd that Moses is, before he encounters the burning bush. He's mastered a domain, but the mastery is insufficient because the domain can change. So what do you master, if you're a master of masters? You master the process of transformation. That makes you a shaman. That's a higher order mode of being.

That's the seeker in the Harry Potter story. The seeker seeks the golden ball that contains the seeds of transformation. It's a fragment of a soul in the Harry Potter series. The seeker attends to that which flicks. That winged ball, that's the winged messenger of the gods. That's Mercury, the mercurial spirit, that pulls gold out of ore. That's what mercury, the metal, does. So you seek the phenomena that glitters and gleams, and attend and pursue it. And if you do that, you win all the games.

And Rowling knew that. Her mythological imagination is unparalleled. Everything she put in those books is dead-on accurate. And how do you tell? How do you know that? How do you know that? She's richer than the queen. Right. Why? Because her books filled a religious void. Why she could do that? There's things she figured out, I just cannot figure out how she knew. That image, that image of the golden winged ball, that's a rare image. If you look that image up, the only comment you find, it's called the round chaos, is something I posted. So, I don't know how she knew that, but she knew.

World, underworld, new world, right? Profane existence, hell, paradise, right? Paradise, paradise lost, paradise regained. But that's the whole process. It's not just one movement. And then you might think, well, it's not even the process. It's the spirit that makes that process possible. It's to embody that ability to make that transformation.

This truly is the essence of human beings. This is the thing that differentiates us biologically from all other creatures. We're the only creatures that can transform their first principles. That's why Malthusian restrictions don't apply to us. We're dependent on natural resources. Define natural resource. There's no such thing as a natural resource. We make computers out of sand. Fossil fuel was irrelevant in 1840.

Whenever we hit an impediment, we change the game. That's really what makes human beings different from all other creatures. We can change the game and change the perceptual frame, probably without limit. This is why the economists are optimists and the biologists are pessimists. Biologists are Malthusian, and they're wrong. And the economists understand that we can always change the game. The world is a limitless horizon of transformative possibility.

And this is something that's very important to understand, because otherwise you fall into this Malthusian nightmare of limited horizons and restriction. "We're going to run out of energy." It's like, the cosmos is made of matter and energy. We're going to run out of energy. We're going to run out of matter after that. So, it's preposterous. It's a show of terrible faith. We can make much of virtually nothing.

And it's even more sophisticated than that. Human beings can make the desert bloom. The Israelis have done that. Well, how? Well, you could say that was technological. It's like, yeah, but what's the precondition of the technology? Well, how about a daring ethos? How about a society predicated on trust because people interact in a reliable manner? How about, if you can trust your neighbor, there's nothing you can't change?

Because what can human beings not do if they work together without friction in relationship to a higher order goal? There's nothing we can't master. Holland took its country from the ocean. That whole place shouldn't even exist. And yet it's arguably the most civilized place on Earth. And no wonder, because if they weren't civilized for 15 minutes, they'd be 10 feet underwater. What's the natural resource? Trust. What's trust dependent on? Integrity. So that's very much worth knowing.

So that's the meta story. Now you know the pattern, and now we can look at its manifestations, and that's what we'll do for the remainder.

## Neuropsychology

Neuropsychologically, is this real? Well, I broached that question earlier. Elkhonon Goldberg was a neuropsychologist who was a student of a man named Alexandr Luria. And Alexandr Luria was a student, if I remember correctly, of a man named Sokolov. These are all Russians, and the Russians were very good neuropsychologists.

Sokolov discovered something called the orienting response. He should have won a Nobel Prize for that. The orienting response is how you react psychophysiologically when something you don't expect happens. He discovered that there was a physiological pattern of response to the unexpected. Right. Now, he was very mechanistic, being a communist and a Marxist; that was a requirement, being a materialist. But it was a brilliant discovery.

Luria laid out the function of the brain, probably better than anyone, in a masterful book that was published in 1982 called Higher Cortical Functions in Man. His student was Elkhonon Goldberg. Now, many people believe that the left hemisphere is specialized for language and the right hemisphere for non-linguistic function. But that's a second-order differentiation of the hemispheres.

Goldberg, who had been trained in the Russian tradition, which is the outstanding neuropsychological tradition, especially in relationship to emotion, posited something more profound, which was that the right hemisphere was specialized for operation in unexplored territory. It was a novelty analysis system. Dreams make their origin, in many ways, in the right hemisphere.

We're talking about the standard right-handed person, by the way, because there can be mixed. Left-handed person, everything's reversed. Not everything, but there are variations of this. But regardless of where the systems are localized, they exist, and they tend to be localized hemispherically in this manner.

So, how do you conceptualize this? Birds use one eye to see what they eat, and they use the other eye to see what might eat them. Right, right, right. So you want one eye on the target, and you want the other eye on all the other things that might be happening while you have one eye on the target. And that's an order-chaos world.

And your brain is literally structured that way. And the right hemisphere does early novelty analysis. When you first learn a task, your whole cortex lights up, so to speak. It's metabolically active, which is why it's effortful. As you get better and better at it, the pattern of activation shifts to the left and then shrinks and moves to the back. So you make a little machine that's now specialized to perform that operation, which is now unconscious and implicit.

Beware of what you practice, because you literally build it into your character. Repeat something 50 times, that's you. And then you might say, well, how do you get rid of that? You don't. You can build a new machine to shut it down, but that takes effort. And if you're stressed, the old machine will come popping back. So that's something to know, too.

So, the right hemisphere is an anomaly and novelty detection system. Part of the reason it uses dreams and fantasy and image is because it can explore more broadly the potential implications of the anomalous occurrence. If someone new and compelling enters the horizon of your life when you're searching for a romantic adventure, you might fantasize about them.

Well, why? Well, it's a matter of exploring something that's novel, and you want to take that fantasy and translate it into actual strategic operation that's goal-directed with a point. That's a movement from right to left. When the left fails, it collapses into the right. The left is specialized for negative emotion. So if you have left prefrontal damage, you're depressed.

If you have right prefrontal damage, you're impulsive and psychopathic. Hyper-confident in your left hemispheric orientation. Narrow, goal-directed, specialized. And great. Because it's hyper-efficient, but its weakness is its narrowness. It's wonderful to be efficient, except when you're wrong. Because being efficient in the wrong way is the worst thing you can do. Faster down the wrong road is not helpful. So, this is a remarkable thing to understand because it presents us with this weird inversion of reality.

There's a physical description of material reality, right? The particle description, let's say. Things are made out of sand. They're made out of elements, and the elements are made out of microparticles, and you go all the way to the bottom. That gets a little weird because, at the quantum level, God only knows what's going on. It doesn't look like particle at all anymore. It's particle and wave at the same time, but it's also indeterminate possibility. It's a whole mess.

But that's so far out of our purview that we can think of things as made out of bits, and that works. So that's reality, but that's not how the brain construes reality. And as we said, reality governs evolution. That's natural selection. It's the world that does the natural selection. Sexual selection is a major component, too, and we'll get to that. So, what are you selected for? A bifurcated consciousness, one of potential and anomaly, and the other of certainty.

The best way to think about it biologically is very straightforward. We can lay this on top of the chaos-order dynamic. What's chaos? Unexplored territory. What's order? Explored territory. How do you define explored? You know what's going to happen there. How do you know? Because you tried out a bunch of different things and you mapped the consequences. So you know what you can do there that works. That's explored territory.

What's outside of that? The barbarians outside of the walled city, right? Outside of the country, outside of your realm of what's known. What deals with that? The right hemisphere, fantasy, anxiety, instinct. The right hemisphere is dominated, by the way, by motivational systems in a way that the left isn't. The left is linguistic, and so it really works in a world of language.

But the right isn't like that. The right is more like the brain of an animal. And when you encounter something new, the motivational systems grip the functions of the right hemisphere in the manner that we described in the other lectures. That produces that cascade of stress responses. And the right alerts the left across the corpus callosum, which unites them, letting it know that an anomaly exists.

There are weird neurological consequences of this. So, for example, if you have right parietal damage, it's about this part of your brain, the right parietal lobe keeps track of things that have gone wrong with your body. OK, now you have a body map that's habitual. You know that, because you know what happens if you chip a tooth or you get a tooth replaced. It's, like, six months of exploring the new place with your tongue until you get used to it. Your body remaps. It takes a lot of work. So you've got a map of your body.

OK, now you have a stroke, and the left side of your body doesn't work, but it's a right parietal stroke. And so you don't notice that your body is half gone. And more than that, you don't notice that the left half of things, whatever that means, exist. So if I get you to draw a clock, you'll draw half a clock with all the numbers on the right side. And if I give you a plate of food, you'll eat all the food on the right. And if I turn the plate, then you'll eat half the food of the semicircle that you now see.

And if you encounter your now-immobile half body in bed by accident, you'll yell to the nurses that someone's arm is in your bed, or you'll try to throw your own leg out. Ramachandran discovered that if you took people with right parietal damage and you poured cold water in their left ear, that that would activate their vestibular system, and the shock of that would hyperexcite the remaining parietal tissue. And the person would realize that the stroke had paralyzed them on the left. They'd have a catastrophic emotional response that would disappear when the irrigation effects wore off, and then they'd forget.

And then, if you tell people, "I noticed that, John, I noticed you're having a hard time moving your left leg." And you'll say, "Well, I really don't feel like moving it." Why? Because you're using the old map. And the catastrophe, that catastrophic emotional response, that's a signal that that map doesn't work. But the right parietal lobe is damaged, and so it doesn't send a signal. So, as far as you're concerned, with your left hemisphere that's all happy, things are just like they always have been. And so that's the blindness of the left hemisphere.

It's routinized. But if the routine is wrong, it can't transform. But the underlying reality here, the underlying reality here that's so remarkable, is that that's the organization of the nervous system—specialization for the unknown and specialization for the known, specialization for unexplored territory and for explored territory.

And you can understand that. It's one thing to sit around the damn campfire. It's another thing to be out there in enemy territory. Those are very, very different places. Say, "Well, materially, they're the same." It's like, that's what dead people say, right. "They're the same. It's the same dirt." Well, that's not the relevant issue, is it? When tribal enemies might be lurking around every corner, and when you and your Stone Age tribesmen are pretty decent prey for very large bears, so.

This has been studied intensely, right? Iain McGilchrist has written a book called The Master and His Emissary that lays out a notion of how the hemispheres interact with one another that's very much akin to Elkhonon Goldberg's novelty routinization model, which is a very good model. But I love the model as well, because it fits exactly on top of our conceptualization. What's the world, really? Explored territory and unexplored territory, but there's an intermediary factor.

We'll close with this. So, a little more neuropsychology. The front part of your brain organizes your action. The back part of your brain reports on the sensory world. They're interacting because really what you're focusing on, it's an interplay between the motor and the sensory. It's not quite that simple because, when you look at a glass, a drinking glass, the neurons that would allow you to grip are preactivated. So there's a motoric component to, even to sensory perception, but we'll leave that aside for the moment.

You see the world with the back half of your brain and you act in it with the front half. And so, part of the reason you see the world is so that you can figure out how to act in it. And pretty much what you pay attention to is the consequences of your action. So there's this tight linkage, as we'd said before, between action and perception. And so that's the very back of the brain, that's the visual element.

They're all laid out there. The sensory area is up top, the top two areas in the bottom sensory unit description. Auditory area, there's a primary zone and a secondary zone. As the auditory area overlaps the visual area, that's the part of your brain you use for silent reading. You're using your ears as, you're using your eyes as ears when you read silently. So, the tertiary zone, which occupies the border between the different senses, appears to be the place where we have the integrated experience of consciousness, because all the senses are reporting at the same time.

Now, this is the last thing I want to show you today. It's called a homunculus. Now, if you look at the brain, the motor unit, there's a strip at the top that's called the primary motor zone. If you do brain surgery on someone, open skull—they're awake because you do brain surgery on awake people, so that's fun to think about—if you probe the motor strip or the sensory strip, people will report sensation in different parts of their body or an impulse to move.

And so, a man named Wilder Penfield, who worked at the Montreal Neurological Institute in Canada, mapped the relationship between the body and the brain on the sensory side and the motor side. And this is the image that he generated. And so, that's kind of what you're like, as far as your brain is concerned.

And it's a very interesting thing to contemplate because, well, a lot of you is thumb, a lot, and a lot of you is right hand, and quite a lot is left hand, and a lot is lips and tongue. And you can really see that in babies. Babies are very wired up in their mouth and tongue, and they'll put everything into their mouth with their hand. And so, eyes, which you can move like mad, your face is pretty well represented and very sensitive.

Will you stand for a second? I want to demonstrate something. OK, so stand here and face there. OK, now I want you to tell me how many fingers I'm putting in your back.

How many?

Yeah.

More than one.

More than one, yeah. How about now?

Five.

Oh, good. You could feel five. How about now?

Two.

OK, well, how about now?

Four.

Yeah, that's good. Well, you were very good at that. It's very hard for people. You could see how the trunk is represented there. It's not represented much at all. Your back is very low resolution. Well, why? Well, you can't move it, can you? You don't need that much sensory feedback. You concentrate the neurology on your face and your tongue, your mouth, your hands. And so that's what you are like, as far as your brain is concerned.

OK, well, what is that creature? You think about what that thing looks like. Well, it's doing a lot of things with its hands, and it's talking about the things that it's doing with its hands. Right. It's doing a lot of things with its eyes. We're very visual human beings. We're the most visual creatures, with the possible exception of birds of prey. But as far as hands and eyes go, we're pretty much it.

Cetaceans, dolphins, they have brains that are about as big as ours in comparison to their body size. But look at them. What the hell are they going to do? They have a body like a test tube. They're going to, what? Use those flippers and go down to the bottom and what, build sand castles? No, they don't build anything. They're very different from us. And their intelligence, whatever it is, is very different.

And their cortex is structured differently. The claims of superhuman intelligence among dolphins, for example, that were pretty popular in the 1960s, they really never went anywhere. If you're going to be intelligent, it helps a lot to have hands, so you can do things. Octopi, they only live about three years. They're really smart. Why? Tentacle city, right? Elephants, too, because they have that proboscis that they can manipulate with.

But we have hands, and we can do a lot of things with hands, and we use our language and our mouth and our tongue to transmit what we do with our hands, and that's how we confront the world. And so then, the reason I showed you the neurology is, right hemisphere is specialized for novelty, left hemisphere is specialized for routine. The motor and sensory systems that are associated with the body give you hands and eyes and mouth.

Well, that's how you confront the world, right, as an active, engaged explorer. That's a good way of thinking about it. That's the creature, that's the master of the domain of chaos and order. We'll elaborate that as we continue.

## Your answer

The reason I am including the transcript of this Maps of Meaning lecture 6 is so that you can understand substantial knowledge base. Content can be included to influence or position your own offering. What that means is that you don't have to be the ultimate authority, you can simply build a knowledge base by your principal influencers. Such that. it's like building a minion you get the best blend of the ingredients which you curate. Jordan Peterson's work influenced me a great deal, beginning with the idea that literacy is the greatest way out of self tyranny and I took his maps of meaning course at his Peterson Academy or Peterson university and. There I learned about the historical repetition of this model, which leads to the Fermi paradox. Filter. What that means is that humans or carbon. Been repeating. The lesson? Which the Israelites. Trade in the desert, not learning the lesson of manna and dependence, but rather becoming. Or demanding should I say, a new king, a new tyrant like Marduk to put to the top of the Babylonian tower? And here we are today, facing super intelligence with AI distributed all around by companies as large language models, and yet fulfilling exactly biblical prophecy and historical patterns of civilizational threats.

Thus Peterson's work is one of the foundations of my work building and stewarding this call to adventure - crafting a storytelling akrasia buster system which is training wheels and preparatory work for dendrite growing of the owner using Council or Witness.