Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.

This episode is an amalgamation of episode 79 of MAPSIF MEANY, recorded by TV Onterium.

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I think of all the stories that we've investigated so far, all the fundamental myths of creation,

that we've investigated so far, the two that we're going to talk about in detail today,

are probably the two stories that have had more impact on the course of world history than any other two.

I'm going to talk in some detail today about the story of creation laid out in Genesis,

and also the story of the Buddha's enlightenment.

Both stories are also characterized by a kind of depth that's virtually limitless.

And I think in some ways that the topics we're going to discuss today are the most enlightening of all the many ideas that we've traveled through so far in this series.

So we're going to be concentrating on an analysis of this schema again,

the idea of being here, of course, that the world of experience, which is the world that mythology is attempting to describe,

has these fundamental constituent elements, one associated with chaos, or nature,

or the unknown, one associated with culture, or the great father, or the predictable,

and another associated with the archetypal sun, the individual, who's the offspring of the interplay of these two fundamental forces.

Now, given that part of the purpose of this series is to elucidate the causes of war and motivation for war,

attention paid to the dualistic nature of the individual as a paramount importance.

So we could say that just as nature has its terrible side, and just as culture has its terrible side,

so the individual has his or her terrible side, and the depth of that capacity, say, for atrocity and vengefulness, is just as deep as the depth of terror that the unknown itself holds.

I think this is a difficult fact for normal individuals to grasp, given that we're highly motivated to view ourselves as,

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