So last week, I told you, I offered you an interpretation of two foundational stories,

right, more than two, but roughly speaking two. The creation stories, because there's two of them

in Genesis, and then also the story of the Buddha. And I was presenting you with a proposition,

and it's a multi-layered proposition. The first proposition is that the archetypal story structure

that we've already been discussing is reflected in detail in those stories. And the archetypal story

structure is something like the existence of a pre-existing state where things are roughly functional,

so that you might think of that as the state of things going well, and that's a state where

your perceptions and your plans are sufficiently developed so that when you act them out in the world,

not only do you get what you desire, but the story itself validates itself through your actions,

right, because what happens when you act something out, and you get what you intend, just like when

you use a map and get where you're going, not only does that get you to where you're going,

but it also validates the plan or the map. And so that's a definition of truth. That's a pragmatic

definition of truth. This is the sort of thing that I was trying to have a discussion with about

Sam Harris because the idea is that we have to orient ourselves in a world where our knowledge is

always insufficient. We never know everything about anything. And so the question then is how can

you ever make a judgment about whether or not you're correct? And the answer to that is something

like, well, you lay out a plan, and you can think about it this way. This is actually an answer to

the postmodernist problem of how is it that you determine whether or not your interpretation of

the world is, we won't say correct, because that's not exactly right. But the postmodernist

subject, say with regards to the interpretation of a text, that there's a very large number of

variations of ways in which that text can be interpreted. And that's actually true. And it is the

same, it's actually a reflection of a deeper claim, which they always often sometimes also make,

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