Savage Messiah by Jim Proser

Author:Jim Proser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

CHAPTER ELEVEN

REALITY AND THE SACRED

I want to talk to you today about what I think is a relatively new way of looking at your experience but maybe even more broadly than that, a new way of looking at reality itself.

—JORDAN PETERSON, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LECTURE REALITY AND THE SACRED

Over thirty years of ceaseless study, research, and meditation had transported Jordan into a new reality. It was a fantastic world of monsters and heroes who were motivated by recognizable psychological complexes. Monstrous Jungian archetypes seethed with Freudian complexes. Heroes fought and struggled through Herculean challenges and if they were strong enough and lucky enough, they won the day.

This world was described in ancient stories, myths, and in sacred literature as a place of moral (or immoral) action. It was not a place of things and ever smaller parts of those things as science now describes the world. This was a world of psychological, not scientific reality, one that many modern people now dismiss as outdated and useless. But millennia before science was invented, this world of stories was the only reality.

It was a place where characters both good and bad, divine and mortal, acted out our ancestors’ deepest fears and prayers in an endless battle for dominance. People preserved hard-won life lessons in these stories, and following generations mapped their lives to these stories accordingly. By following the worn paths of their heroes, ancient peoples were able to ethically cooperate and build towering cultures of art and science.

Culture itself was then mythologized and usually represented as paternal, as in Atlas holding up the world. Nature was generally mythologized as maternal, as in Mother Nature. The individual, male and female, was mythologized as both a hero and villain. Each had a lighted or conscious side and a hidden or shadow side.

Culture offered people security and prosperity, but held the threat of tyranny. Nature brought renewal and solace, but also death. The individual as hero offered freedom and the strength to overcome even the gods, but as a villain also embodied evil.

The path that Jordan had been clearing through this fantastic world for decades showed that it was possible for an ordinary, modern person to make the catastrophe of human life significantly more bearable by aligning their lives properly with these sacred stories.

Over the last twenty years I would say there’s been a revolution in psychology and the revolution has involved the transformation in the way that we look at the world and that’s what I want to talk to you about today.

I entitled this talk Reality and the Sacred. It’s a strange title for a talk to modern people because we don’t really understand what the sacred means unless we live within a worldview that’s essentially, I wouldn’t say archaic, but at least traditional for modern, free-thinking, fundamentally liberal people. The idea of the sacred is anachronistic or if not anachronistic, incomprehensible, so I want to start with a story from the Old Testament.1

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