This chaos this is the birthplace of things that's why often it's represented
as feminine
Because feminine things are the birthplace of things now again, you know people are stuck
with the necessity of interpreting their experience through the biological platform of
Interpretation that they evolved and so we could say well we we recognize
Feminine we recognize masculine we recognize parent we recognize child and that's that's ancient right
That's as ancient as mammals and so those are fundamental social cognitive categories
and
We had to exploit those
categories to represent the world beyond that when we started to be able to represent the world beyond that as a just as a primate
Like a chimpanzee or a tree dwelling primate a complex primate almost all of their categories are social cognitive
Right why? because they live in complex social environments
And there's a relationship between the size of the social environment that a primate inhabits and its brain size
the bigger the brain the larger the environment
And you could think there's a loop there right if your brain is too
Small you can't handle the larger environment so
The environment grows and it selects for people for creatures that are complex enough
to compute the environment
and then that gives a selective advantage to creatures that are
Acute or are sharp enough to compute the environment, and so there's more of them, and it loops and the brain grows I mean
It's not the only thing driving the evolution of the brain among primates, but it's it's a primary source
So we have those categories to begin with and then we have to view the world as it manifests itself
outside those primary categories through the lens of those categories and so what happens is we use the symbolism of of sex differentiation
And the symbolism of parent-child
Relationships to to begin to account for the manner in which the world manifests itself
Masculine why well, that's the patriarchy, chaos feminine
Why? well partly its conceived of in opposition to the patriarchy, but more importantly, it's the thing from which order rises
So it's perfectly reasonable to consider it feminine and then order again, and then the question is well
You have order farther
Chaos mother and then you have this this transformational process well that's the mythological hero, and those are the three fundamental
characters of mythology individual
Culture nature right it's the universal world and then that's differentiated further
positive individual negative individual hero an adversary tyrant and wise King
the destructive element of nature and the creative element of nature
And and those are perfectly reasonable categories they they do a lovely job of actually
Representing how the world does manifest itself to us in
The domains that are permanent, there's always a conscious observer who's ambivalent about the nature of the world
There's always a social structure
That's half tyrannical and half order producing
And there's always the nature that gives rise to everything and that destroys it at the same time
Always, it's permanent and so that's another reason it's.. it's so interesting that's another reason why the mythological
Representations are hyper real
Because they you think what makes something real?
Let's say protons are real why?
because
At one level of analysis every single thing is made out of protons
So you can use it as an explanatory tool.. the concept, you can use it as an explanatory tool for every possible situation
And it's true across all possible spans of time although protons do decay
But it takes billions and billions of years so real means works now and works forever applies now and applies everywhere
Well, that's exactly what this map means it's that there's always an observer
There's always a framework of interpretation and there's always that which is being observed there's always the the individual
There's always the social environment the dominance hierarchy, and there's always the nature that exists outside of that
There's always the knower the known and the unknown
always
So then the question is well, how do those things interrelate?
Well you differentiate them into their positive and negative elements because there's always the positive and negative element
And then you tell stories about how the different categories interact
And that's what the stories do and the more mythological the story the more that underlying schema is
Self-evident in the in the in the plot and you
specially see that I think in stories for children and
maybe that's because
Children can't understand stories unless they're archetypal
like blatantly archetypal and that would make sense right because the stories have to appeal to the
Instinctive knowledge of the child or the child wouldn't be able to comprehend them and so you know I've said I saw this quite
dramatically with my own kids watching them watch Disney movies for example my son was absolutely obsessed with Pinocchio and
Particularly obsessed with the scene where Pinocchio and his father are escaping from the whale and the whale turns into this sort of smoke belching
Locomotive thing that's chasing them through the water
He would rewind that and watch it and rewind it and watch it and rewind it and watch it like
Over and over and over and you think what the hell's that kid up to well you know it took us
what six hours to do a brief run-through through Pinocchio still by still there's a lot of information in that movie a
tremendous amount of information, and then what the kids trying to do is to
incorporate it to
To understand it to embody it and that's all happening in some sense I would say unconsciously
It's like it's unconscious in that he couldn't articulate what he was doing and neither could anyone else
But that doesn't mean he wasn't doing something he was definitely doing something he was doing the same thing
that enabled my nephew to put on the the night suit
When he did that the little knight hat and the sword and figure out how to go after the great dragon of chaos
And so I wanted to tell you a little bit of more about this idea of chaos
You
