Hello Predator—Meet Prey! You'll get along famously

I know, this seems somewhat off topic for this thread, but all these ideas are closely related. I put this blog thread into the Poetic/Narrative series because I've come to realize the poetic in a sense means the unconscious or the right-brain approach, while the narrative refers to the left-brain approach. Not precisely, but I do believe poetry (even just a poetic influence or spirit in an otherwise narrative piece of writing) originates in the right brain while narrative is more a product of the left. That's doubtless an oversimplification. Narrative involves elements of both, but the more it leans toward the poetic the more it involves the creative and poetic right brain.

I learned from Jonathan Pageau and his brother Matthieu that in Genesis when God created Heaven and Earth, it refers to the material world and the realm of the immaterial. Heaven is the realm of spirit—thoughts, feelings, emotions, motive, ideas, and all the rest of the immaterial things we're made of, and that govern our societies. For instance rules and traditions and ideas and values. Without these things there would be no civilization, no groups of people who consider themselves a tribe or a city-state or a nation held together by principles. This is a very enlightening way to look at the Bible (the Christian bible I mean. Technically the word just means the book, and every holy book could be called the Bible. Actually every book could). We've become so used to the completely literal and materialist interpretation of it promoted by our modern society that this sounds alien to many of us. The Pageaus come from a Christian Orthodox tradition that has remained a lot closer to early concepts of Christianity. There's still an understanding of the symbolism and what it refers to. Seen this way it takes its place beside the rest of the world's religions and mythologies as a symbolic system of language, and it becomes clear the things it refers to are far more real than what many people think. Heaven isn't a world in the clouds above us—as Jesus clearly stated "The kingdom of Heaven is within you." It's also without, because it also refers to those governing principles that hold societies together, as well as the principles of reality (aka laws of physics or something similar). Many of the stories in the Bible tell us about these sorts of things. For example huge parts of Exodus describe how Moses (symbolic of leaders in general) discovered the principles of leadership needed to create a nation and keep it lawful.

But I don't want to stay this off-topic any longer. I just need to pop in with reminders of this stuff every now and then. This is at the heart of what I'm meandering about in here. All my digressions into the poetic and the narrative, the masculine and the feminine, order and chaos, left brain and right brain—they all merge into one big concept that I'm constantly working at understanding and explaining better. It's what's at the heart of much of symbolism (gods and devils being symbols of certain spirits or states of mind or moods or attitudes for example). And that makes me realize that Loki and Satan are basically just two somewhat different interpretations of devils from two different cultures. A devil is just something that can bedevil you, or tempt you or seduce you away from reason and virtue. They're parts of the psyche, or moods or spirits or attitudes that arise from the psyche, either of an individual or of a collective. Seeing them this way is far more useful and I think closer to the original intent than seeing them literally as beings living in the sky or on a mountain somewhere. People just needed a symbolic way to think about them and to discuss them, and they didn't have the clinial language of psychology (not for a few millennia). Essentially this was their form of psychology and philosopy and medicine and law and general wisdom. It was just all rolled up into one thing in ancient times.

Another spin-off thought that just hit me related to what I just said—

The Lord of the Flies is a nickname for an ancient devil called Ba'al (short for Beelzebub). A better translation would be the Lord of the Fliers, meaning flying things, or more properly I think flying insects. Ba'al was one of the many ancient deities that got mashed together to become Satan (or the Devil or Lucifer). I realize I'm probably off on some of these—there's controversy over whether Lucifer was really the same character also referred to as Satan or the Antagonist/Slanderer. I'm holding these concepts loosely, which I've found often works better than to grip them tightly (meaning to be too precise with language and end up missing the spirit of the law for the precise letter of the law).

To get back on subject (of this off-topic branch), flying insects are also known as bugs. They're things that can bug you, sometimes horribly. Sometimes to the point of being major pestilences (includes the word pest) or plagues. What I'm getting at is the symbolic way these words are being used. The lord of the flies means the god (or devil) of the bugs, specifically the flying bugs. Those are the ones that bug you the worst, right? Swarms of mosquitoes or flies or wasps or bees or gnats that can ruin a perfect summer day. They're small buzzing mites that just keep pestering you incessantly. Each one is negilgible by itself, but taken together as a swarm they cause a major disturbance. A thousand little nagging doubts or minor pains or annoyances that add up to something terrible. Ba'al was the god of this (the spirit of it). I've seen references to the idea that the Christian devil can take the form of an insect or a swarm of them. Much like Dracula can take the form of mist, a pack of rats, and also of insects (I think to some extent he was modeled after demons or maybe the devil). Mist to imply that he can get in anywhere, to any house or castle or stronghold, through the tiniest of cracks. They used metaphors like this—if something was immaterial they represented it with mist or cloud or vapor. Just like the vapors of alcohol I mentioned above—vapor because it's a spirit. Ancients would discourse at length on the four classical elements, representing (for one thing) four different levels of solidity. Earth, water, air and fire (meaning celestial fire—the fire of the sun and stars and the moon, as well as maybe earthbound fire, which was stolen from the gods by Prometheus and gifted to us—a divine thing). Earth means the lowest, coarsest, most solid and dense element. Water is lighter and more fluid, and air more so, to the point that it doesn't need to puddle in depressions in the earth, but rises above the ground into the sky (realm of the gods). And fire is the most immaterial of all. It has no physical mass at all, it's pure corruscating and flickering energy. It always strains strongly upward, toward the heavens it comes from, and so does the smoke that rises from it.

I think many people (including some of the pre-Socratic philosophers who theorized about this stuff) took some of it very literally, while some at least partially understood that they were groping toward pure concepts but had to use crude material metaphors because they couldn't quite grasp the conceptual yet. They needed some way to work with the ideas, and that was through metaphor and symbol.

To get back to the metaphor I've been digging into, what better way to symbolize a massive catastrophe that's the result of a lot of endless nagging or annoying little problems that built up to a point where you just couldn't stand it anymore? A being that symbolizes the spirit of swarming insects. And he's been depicted as a swarm of them that merge together and take the form of a semi-human devil. Much the way Dracula did in the 1992 movie by Francis Ford Coppola. Let me see if I can find the scene real quick.

Here we go:

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Seeing this I understand why it's rats—small scurrying things. Another form of plague, but a very common domestic one that people everywhere are familair with. They get in your house or a building and they can hide and travel around secretly and eat away at your food stores, at the same time possibly contaminating them. And they're infernally difficuilt to kill or get rid of. People have been driven mad by them—just check out The Rats in the Walls by Lovecraft. Generally all you hear are the quiet little scurrying sounds that are often inside the walls or under furniture or inside of furniture where you can't easily get at them or see them. And the scratching and gnawing in the middle of the night as they slowly destroy your home. This is another perfect metaphor for small secretive disturbing things that gnaw away at you and your security (symbolized by your house, your bedroom—all the places you feel secure but where they can always get in). And you find the droppings, and little nests inside of drawers or old boxes or between boxes in the basement. They're cold alien little scavengers that care not a whit for your property or your privacy. They invade, they gnaw little holes, they eat right through your photographs and your belongings and make nests inside your storage areas. Definitely a plague! its easy to see why demons or monsters like Dracula (who I believe was supposed to be at least semi-demonic) would be able to transform into something like that.

Lol, I might need to start another blog thread and transfer a few of these posts there. This seems to be becoming my focus now.

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An older talk, from two years ago. McGilchrist shot his part on a potato, but this gets into some really good stuff about the differences between intelligence and wisdom. He gets more into the spiritual and the intuitive than I've seen him do so far in the other videos.

I bought his latest book, The Matter with Things, but it's incredibly long and difficult to get through because he piles on so many examples and discusses every part at such great length. These videos are a much better way to access the material.

The ideas discussed here remind me of a couple of things—

There's an ancient idea expressed as "Moving the mind into the heart" that I've seen in relation to Buddhism, Yoga and contemplative Christianity.

And the thing I keep saying:

Practice the forms of your art until you've fully absorbed them, and then work intuitively.

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A very powerful and intriguing video. It never mentions the right and left hemispheres of the brain, but is mainly about the conscious and unconscious minds, and the reductive/disenchanting tendencies of the egoistic conscious mind, which wants to believe there is nothing more powerful than itself in existence.

This guy does an amazing job of explaining much of Jung's theory without reducing it to a simplistic caricature, while making it pretty accessible to the average viewer (I think).

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As it turns out, the essentialsalts channel has only done two videos on Jung (besides several mentions in videos about Nietzsche or other great thinkers). The one I posted earlier is his second. This is the first, which goes into great depth about his ideas. For anyone interested, this might be one of the best introductions to Jung.

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This video puts some of my own thoughts into much better perspective. I've read several of Nietzsche's books, and started in on Jung's Zarathustra Lectures, where he essentially psychoanalyzed the philosopher through his writings. There were one or two books about him as well—I think one of them was Kaufman's Nietzsche— Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. I've heard many of the criticisms and misunderstandings of his ideas and always felt like they were off-base, but it's hard to clarify exactly why. I haven't developed a clear enough picture of his overall corpus to be able to do that. Apparently the guy in this video has, at least more so than I have. Each of the major points he brings up are things I've thought, but couldn't articulate as well as he did here—like for instance his Will to Power being about power over yourself, not external power over other people. So many people misunderstand that.

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One of Jonathan Pageau's best videos on Christian symbolism. He focuses on the visual symbolism of iconography, but it also helps to understand the way the ancients used symbolisn in general. One thing that really struck me in this video is the pairs of opposites everywhere—the left hand vs the right hand, Peter and Paul, sheep and goats, heaven and earth, and on and on. It made me realize it works very much like the Chinese Yin and Yang symbolism which also separates everything in the world into paired opposites. He even mentioned at one point that the right hand of God represents Justice and the left hand Mercy. Hands not meaning physical appendages, but directions—you sit on God's right hand side or on his left hand side. That also connects up very strongly with the ancient symbolism of the Kabbala, which has three pillars. The central one represents balance, the left one masculine Justice (sometimes called Severity) and the right one feminine Mercy.

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Wow, I wasn't expecting to find an image that shows Yang and Yin at the top. I believe the way this is used is, when you find yourself tilting too strongly in one direction, you need to pull toward the other pole in order to restore balance. Too much severity toward other people, maybe you need to soften up and show more mercy, or at times maybe you need to go the other way. It seems odd that Victory and Power are on the feminine side of Mercy. It's a complex symbol, and it has lots of subtleties to it. Just like life does.

At the end of the video, I think in response to the last question, asked by the presenter, Jonathan lays out a lot of great info on how to recoginze and understand Christian symbolism. But that's pretty much what his videos are always about.

Another similarity between the two systems of symbolism—in the Kabbala you start at the bottom, Kingdom, which is the purely physical world of objects and solid things, and you follow the paths through the sephiroth (spheres) trying to work your way up to the top, the Crown, which is purely spiritual. This is like Moses climbing the mountain, from the Earth at the bottom (the physical world) to heaven at the top, which is the purely spiritual world of God. It takes some doing, a long time of spiritual practice and prayer, and most of us will never reach anywhere near as high as Moses, who was one capable of reaching all the way to the top where you can commune with God almost directly.


In the story of Sodom and Gamorrah there was one man God decided to save from the destruction everyone else had earned through their sinful living. The angel told him to go to the top of a nearby mountain (to pray and reach a state of spiritual purity), but he said he couldn't make it, he was too weak. But he was able to bargain with the angel and go halfway up the mountain and live under the auspices of his daughters. The directions up and down are always symbolic, as are left and right and East and West. I'll see if I can find the video where Pageau talked about that and link it below.

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I think this must be it.

Oops—at first I posted a short clip that was only about Nostalgia. But now I've got the full-length video in place. It seems to be the one I was looking for.

Nope—that wasn't it either. Well, now I've popped in a video about the use of symbolism in the movie Logan. He talks about the symbolism of climbing a mountain in the spiritual sense.

Wow, that turned out to be a really great video—short, sweet, and to the point, and loaded with great stuff.

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Here's his presentation about the symbolism of the structure of Paradise, which is basically a mountain in a walled garden.