The Exodus begins

By Xoic · Nov 25, 2022 · ·
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  1. Back in the spring Jordan Peterson announced (around the time he joined Daily Wire) that he was getting together some of the smartest people he knows to go into deep discussion about Exodus in preparation for a new series of Biblical lectures, as a followup to his amazing series on Genesis. Apparently the Exodus Seminar has happened, and as far as I'm aware this is the first video to be offered in relation to it, aside from some mentions here and there in some of Peterson's videos.*



    Excellent and crystal clear breakdown by Jonathan Pageau, explaining that Israel represents the Kingdom of God, or a proper relationship to it on the part of man anyway, and Egypt represents the Kingdom of Man, the 'worldly world'—the world of materialism and physical manifesation. Pharoah represents tyranny, and slavery represents a slavery of the soul, bondage to the material principles of wealth and power. When the Pharoah decreed the sacrifice of all the males born into Egypt (heralding the coming of Moses), it was a destruction of the masculine principle, an overall feminizing in hopes that if they de-masculinize the Hebrews nobody will be strong eough to kill the Pharoah and ascend to his throne. It's all very psychological. Water is a very feminine element, fluid and graceful and life-sustaining, but capable of becoming destructive in extremity, and the Nile sheltered little baby Moses, as did several women. His mother cast him into the Nile and he was discovered by a group of mostly women, with male servants who did the bidding of the feminine (if I remember right). Moses was like a little Noah in his Ark, riding the water to survive the massacre of all other Hebrew males of his generation.

    Moses apparently represents the individual with the power to assert his will and the wisdom to do so properly and to judge wrong actions harshly and act against them.

    As I've been discovering and saying throughout the religion-oriented parts of this blog, religion has always been psychology, and it refers to the inner world of the heart, mind and soul or however you want to describe it. It does so in powerful symbolic language. The mistake of todays materialists and fundamentalists is that they refuse to see it symbolically and insist on taking it all very literally.

    I'm very much looking forward to more videos like this from Pageau and Peterson's other religious-minded friends, and then to Peterson's own lectures when they happen (apparently beginning in June). This is a truly historic happening to those who want to understand what religions are really all about, and are open-minded enough to break out of today's materialist or fundamentalist programming.

    * My bad. How did I forget? Peterson did a video not long ago with Pageau's brother Matthieu about his book The Language of Creation. In fact my last blog entry was about that.
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Comments

  1. Xoic
  2. Xoic
    Here's a clip from the first episode:

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  3. Xoic
    I want to try to summarize very briefly what was covered in the first installment, and end on my tentative formulation of what God represents. The Jonathan Pageau video at the top of this thread covers much of the same material as the round table discussion.

    I already listed, in my first post above, what many of the symbols in the story represent. The Pharoah is tyranny, Moses stands for you as an individual with the power of wise discernment and judgement, capable of being a leader. Women and water (including the many wells, beside which we usually find the women) represent the feminine, which is also sometimes formulated as the chaos that existed at the beginning of Genesis before it became a cosmos of order and meaning.

    What this early part of the story of Exodus seems to mean is that there will be times in your life when you're enslaved to a tyrant of some sort. That could be an addiction, a neurosis or anxiety, a boss, teacher or life partner or a friend or family member who tyranizes you in some toxic/abusive way, or many other things. Also included is the idea that, if/when you manage to break free of that slavery, you probably won't immediately find yourself in the promised land, but rather wandering lost and near hopeless in the desert, and that period might last for a very long time.

    Early in the story Moses killed a bad Egyptian, in what apparently was a too-early effort to end the slavery, but he hadn't yet made himself right with God, and so he lacked the true moral authority to make such an act meaningful. Plus he killed the wrong Egyptian. It was just a mean one, a very petty tyrant subjugating a random Hebrew (a person trying to live right according to God). Remember, Egypt is the kingdom of Man—tyranny represented by stone.

    Before Moses became the great leader we know him as, he had to raise himself spiritually, symbolized by climbing Mount Sinai, where he was able to commune with God and bring down the tablets with the Laws inscribed on them. The discussion hasn't reached that point in the story yet, possibly in installment two.
  4. Xoic
    Here's my attempt at a formulation of what God represents in the Bible, at my current level of understanding.

    I said yesterday that religion has always been psychology. To an extent that's true, but there's more to it than that, and it's also more than simply moral wisdom, though there's a lot of that included.

    I believe God represents a correct understanding and orientation to moral wisdom, to the moral laws and traditions of your people, and to the very structure of reality itself
    In a sense the laws and traditions of your people are an external version of your conscience, which is your inner guide to moral wisdom. The conscience acts as both a guide and a judge, and it punishes you when you knowingly break powerful moral codes. Even if you unknowingly break them. No, that isn't quite right. It isn't your conscience that punishes you, it can only warn. What punishes you is reality itself, when you fail to properly understand and align youself with certain elements of it.

    What does it mean to properly understand and align yourself with the structure of reality? Think about the nature of this particular story. There will be times in your life (there have already been many) when you will run afoul of a tyrant of some sort and it will plunge you into a form of slavery. And even If you manage to escape the slavery, you might (probably will) find yourself wandering lost in a desert, not in the fabled promised land—a version of paradise or the Garden of Eden. The desert is the garden of thorns and thistles, into which we were expelled on developing human-level consciousness, when we became aware of the inveitable fact of our own mortality and of sickness, pain and suffering. We're fully human now, as adults anyway, and unmistakably aware of pain and suffering and the fact of mortality. There's no escaping that without losing conscious awareness. Many people try to dull the awareness of this harsh reality though drugs and alcohol or through various forms of living in the pleasure of the moment while fully aware (though hiding from the fact) that it will bring pain and suffering.

    To walk with God is to take full responsibility for the proper bearing of all this horrible knowledge, and to try to live properly despite all the temptations toward short-term benefits. It's the Moses in you who leads you properly, who has the wisdom and the knowledge to solve the problems as they arise. In some sense he's a part of your conscience, or of how it functions in your life. But ulitmately it's only to the extent that he obeys God's laws that he has that wisdom and moral anuthority. And until he manages to reach a high level of spiritual awareness (ascends to the heights of Mount Sinai, where he's capable of communing with God), even he is subject to all the same pain and suffering the rest of us are. Even afterwards in, fact, if he slips or lapses.
  5. Xoic
    Another great clip from Day 1:

  6. Xoic
    A big part of the discussion in episode 2 is about the meaning of "I am that I am," and the various translations of that mysterious statement of what God is. The best answer, which I think was said by Jonathan Pageau, was that it means I am the very ground of being itself, from which everything arises. Something like "I am all that exists," or "I am everything."

    Well damn! That's ridiculously close to my own revelation that every sentence we speak, every thought we have, is an imperfect attempt at the perfect sentence, which is "Everything is." It means essentially that our every thought is a prayer, and our every spoken or written line as well.
  7. Louanne Learning
    I have read with interest your posts. Honestly, I am not sure if you are taking the position as interpreter or believer, but I will reply nevertheless with my thoughts.

    I can't agree with the presumption that materialists do not appreciate symbolism, nor that a materialist mindset involves programming. (I could say here that all minds are programmed, but I will refrain.)

    Let's be clear about what a materialist is. It's just the position that all that exists is ultimately dependent on physical processes. This includes the human mind. Understanding this does not relieve the mind of its symbolic predispositions. Exodus is a story. Materialists can very well understand its symbolism. But believing it's a story from a supernatural source is altogether a very different thing.

    Where does the need for God come from? Certainly, we can have moral wisdom without this external source. Punishment when you broke the moral code has been a mainstay of human history. It's not surprising that a social animal like us evolved the capacity to feel guilty. It served the group - to facilitate forgiveness and social reparation. Our evolution provides all the explanation we need.

    One more note - the idea that God is all that exists is very pantheistic indeed.
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  8. Xoic
    I'm not interested in arguing. You're obviously not here with an open mind or willing to learn anything. I might have said some of the things you accuse me of, but I absolutely never said some of them. I don't know where you got some of these ideas. It seems you want to put words in my mouth so you can argue against familiar straw men.
  9. Louanne Learning
    Oh gosh, an argument is the last thing I am looking for. You presented your view, I presented mine. I'm just looking for discussion. If I misunderstood you, please set me straight.
  10. Xoic
    Ok, I found where you got some of that: "This is a truly historic happening to those who want to understand what religions are really all about, and are open-minded enough to break out of today's materialist or fundamentalist programming."

    I can't tell if you deliberately misquoted me or if you really just didn't understand it. First, I said "materialist or fundamentalist programming." Plus I said it's about learning—wanting to understand. Are you saying you were already fully aware of all these symbols in the story of Exodus, and that nothing here comes as a surprise to you? I certainly wasn't aware of just about any of them, and I doubt many people are. Nor are most people, religious or secular, aware of how it links up with psychology the way they're pointing out.

    The more I learn about this stuff the more I begin to realize that religion was never what I used to think it was, and that in fact it's something I can really get behind.

    I have no idea where you got the notion that I said it's anything supernatural. In fact I said, in bold print: "Religion has always been psychology."

    "Where does the need for God come from? Certainly, we can have moral wisdom without this external source."
    What do you mean, "This external source"? You seem to think I have a fundamentalist understanding of the Bible, which I absolutely don't. I don't think you really paid any attention to what I said above or watched any of the videos. If you really wanted to dialogue with me about it you should at least familiarize yourself first with the material, and not come in thinking it's something it's not. Also if you post here again in this argumentive manner I just won't respond.
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  11. Xoic
    Here's what I said I believe God is: "I believe God represents a correct understanding and orientation to moral wisdom, to the moral laws and traditions of your people, and to the very structure of reality itself"

    What about that sounds supernatural to you? In fact it sounds exactly like what you yourself said. But you insist on casting me as some fundamentalist who believes God is a supernatural being. There was a time many years ago when I used to argue against Creationists online. Pretty quickly somebody informed me that most Christians don't have such silly ideas about God and Heaven. That sobered me up pretty quick and opened my mind up to the questions that eventually led me here.

    Now I'm studying what some of the world's great Bible scholars have to say about it, which is a far cry from fundamentalism.

    The reason I refuse to get bogged down in an argument is because I'm still learning about it, and I don't have a fixed position. I won't be pinned down to one. It would be incredibly arrogant to assume I know what it all means, when people have been deeply studying this material for millennia and are still revealing layers of wisdom buried in it. But so far what I'm seeing is that the Bible is a book of the great wisdom of the ancient world, written in powerful symbolic language. Just like any other myths or fables or folk tales, the stories use personification and symbolism to teach hard-won lessons. Many of these lessons have been long lost in the modern world, where we tend to take a very dismissive attitude to religions, because we've come to believe they're very literal stories about sky-gods and angels.

    Can we not take wisdom from a fable like The Ant and the Grasshopper, because it's silly to believe that insects can talk? For whatever reason nobody has a problem suspending disbelief for stories like that, but when it comes to the Bible we believe it has to taken absolutely literally.

    In fact, you commented on another of my religious blog threads a while back, didn't I cover much of this then? Do you remember? —I said Bible stories are structured so they have 2 levels—a simple and very literal one for the people who need that, and a much more subtle one for the people who can't buy into it literally. Jesus said that directly in the Sermon on the Mount. But you persist in asserting they only have the most fundamentalist meaning, and that anyone who isn't a hardcore atheist must be a fundamentalist.
      Louanne Learning likes this.
  12. Xoic
    There are several problems with modern people being able to understand the Bible. One is that many denominations insist you must believe literally in everything in the Bible, that none of it is to be taken figuratively. Another part is that the symbolism they used, while probably very familiar at the time, is baffling to us today. We need the experts to tell us what it means, That's what this series of videos is about. It's translating the ideas (not just the words) into terms modern people can understand, and showing that there indeed is great wisdom there, whether or not you believe in a supernatural diety.

    As I've said several times on this blog, this way of looking at the Bible opens it up to people like me who would otherwise be atheists, as I was. What's changed isn't my belief, it's my understanding of what religion is and always was. Now I would say that we're all religious, we just don't know it because we don't understand what religion is.
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  13. Louanne Learning
    Thank you very much for the thoughtful reply. I taught in a Catholic high school. Grade 9 Religion class covered the Bible. It was not taught literally but figuratively, very much in keeping with some things that you have written about here. This is the tradition of the Bible I am familiar with. I have always understood the Bible to be read symbolically.

    I never meant to cast you as a fundamentalist. I never used that word and it wasn't in my thoughts. My thoughts were just on the contents of the posts.

    No, it is not my contention that anyone one who isn't a hardcore atheist must be a fundamentalist. I am neither. How could I possibly know there is no god? I cannot pretend to know everything that exists everywhere. All I have are my senses and a brain to interpret the stimuli that activates them. That doesn't mean that's all there is.

    Thank you for clarifying your position. I appreciate it.
  14. Friedrich Kugelschreiber
    Many of these lessons have been long lost in the modern world, where we tend to take a very dismissive attitude to religions, because we've come to believe they're very literal stories about sky-gods and angels.

    I'd like to push back a little on the idea that religion and religious stories are equivalent. The Bible obviously has a great deal to do with Christianity (or Judaism), but learning about the Bible is definitely not the same as learning about Christianity. If you haven't been to an Orthodox church before, I'd recommend it, if only as an aesthetic experience (if you're susceptible to that kind of thing).
  15. Xoic
    I'd like to push back a little on the idea that religion and religious stories are equivalent.

    Ok, I agree with that. I wasn't trying to say they are, I just grabbed some words in a hurry while forumlating a response to Louanne. But all of this does help me to think deeper into this, which is the whole point.

    What I'm concerned with in this blog entry is the Exodus seminar and what I'm learning from it. And of course the stories of the Bible are ways of getting across religious ideas. That can be combined with church and the rituals and music etc can greatly heighten the religious experience. To this day the Biblical stories serve as the basis for sermons. They represent the original revelations, or call them deep insights, of the most perceptive Hebrew people of the time.

    And when I say "Religion has always been psychology" I suppose that would be easy to misinterpret or misunderstand. I certainly don't mean that the ancient Hebrews understood psychology, or knew that they were talking about anything that took place in the human mind. We don't percieve archetypes that way. They exist in the collective unconscious—which is far outside of anything we understand as a part of ourselves. The only way we can become consciously aware of its contents is through projection or in dreams or visions or sudden flashes of inspiration etc. All those Freudian mechanisms.

    In ancient times they didn't have anything like television, movies, cell phones, the internet etc. In other words endless entertainment that keeps us focused on the surface or largely on fantasy or irrelevant things. Many people spent a great deal of time delving deep into the inner world, what we today know as the mind. Probably the mecca of that (irony unintended) was in India. But every ancient civilization had its religions and sects and practices designed to properly align people with the inner world (the psyche) and the outer world (physical reality). In the Hebraic civilization this was the Torah, part of which we know as the Old Testament.

    Those "Most perceptive people," who came to be known as prophets and messiahs etc, probably lived through some intense and horrific experiences (deep psychological insight is often prompted by trauma), and as a result they had profound dreams and visions and were able to see right through the surface level of reality to the underlying patterns that we're normally unaware of.

    In dreams and visions archetypes show up as human figures or possibly animals, and in various other forms. Whatever can be used to get across the idea. So they were groping with powerful ideas that they knew were immensely meaningful, and had no way to express them other than through stories populated with human figures, some of whom represented transcendent principles, so could only be seen as supernatural. A couple of millennia later, Jung was able to use far better psychological terminology, as well as a much deeper understanding of the way the mind works—including an understanding of the unconscious—to express the same ideas.

    And I'm not interested in arguing whether religion is really supernatural or not. I'm not saying this is the only way or the right way, I'm saying "This is the psychological understanding of the Old Testament stories, as presented by the group in the Exodus seminar videos, as well as I can currently grasp it."
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