The Eternal Question Of Human Beings: How Do You Live In The World? 

The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s Biblical Series, which explores the psychological significance of the Bible. In this segment, he addresses the complex and powerful nature of dreams, comparing it to artists’ talent at portraying more information than has yet to be articulated. He considers the questions: Where does information in a dream come from? What draws us to music? How long have humans been observing each other? And, the eternal question of human beings: How do you live in the world? You can explore more in Dr. Peterson’s extensive catalog, available on DailyWire+. 

I think the theory that dreams are merely the consequence of random neuronal firing is absolutely absurd because there is nothing random about dreams. They are structured and complex, and they are not like snow on a television screen or static on a radio. They are complicated. I have often seen people have very coherent dreams that have a perfect narrative structure. They are fully developed in some sense. So, that theory just does not go anywhere with me. I cannot see that as useful at all. I am more likely to take the phenomena seriously and say there is something to dreams.

You dream of the future; then you try to make it into a reality. That seems to be important. Or maybe you dream up a nightmare and try to make that into a reality; people do that too if they are hellbent on revenge, for example, and full of hatred and resentment. That manifests itself in terrible fantasies. Those are dreams; then people go act them out. These things are powerful. Whole nations can get caught up in collective dreams. That is what happened to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. It is an absolutely remarkable, amazing, horrific, destructive spectacle. The same thing happened in the Soviet Union. And the same thing happened in China. We have to take these seriously and try to understand what is going on.

Carl Jung believed that dreams could contain more information than was yet articulate. I think artists do the same. People go to museums, and they look at paintings — Renaissance paintings or modern paintings — and they do not exactly know why they are there. I was in a room in New York full of Renaissance art, the greatest painters. I thought maybe that room was worth a billion dollars or something outrageous because there were about 20 paintings in there. Priceless. Why are those paintings worth so much? And why is there a museum in the biggest city in the world devoted to them? And why do people from all over the world come and look at them? What are those people doing? One of them was of the assumption of Mary — a beautifully painted, absolutely glowing work of art — with 20 people standing in front of it looking at it. What are those people up to? They do not know. Why did they make a pilgrimage to New York to come and look at that painting? It is not like they know. Why is it worth so much? I know there is a status element to it too, but that begs the question, why do those items become such high-status items? What is it about them that is so absolutely remarkable? We are strange creatures.

I was trying to figure out, in part, where does the information that is in a dream come from? Because it has to come from somewhere. You can think about it as a revelation because it is as though it springs out of the void, and it is new knowledge and it is a revelation. You did not produce it. It just appears. I am scientifically minded, and I am quite a rational person, and I like to have an explanation for things that is rational and empirical before I look for any other kind of explanation. I do not want to say that everything that is associated with divinity can be reduced in some manner to biology or to evolutionary history or anything like that, but, insofar as it is possible to do that reduction, I am going to do that. And I am going to leave the other phenomena floating in the air because they cannot be pinned down. In that, I would put the category of mystical or religious experience, which we do not understand at all.

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Artists observe one another. They observe people, and they represent what they see. They transmit a message of what they see to us, and they teach us to see. We do not necessarily know what it is we are learning from them, but we are learning something, or, at least, we are acting like we are learning something. We go to movies, we watch stories, and we immerse ourselves in fiction constantly. That is an artistic production. For many people, the world of the arts is a living world, and that is particularly true if you are a creative person. It is the creative, artistic people who move the knowledge of humanity forward, and they do that with their artistic productions first. They are on the edge. The dancers, the poets, the visual artists, and the musicians do that, and we are not sure what they are doing.

Why do you like music? It gives you a deep intimation of the significance of things — and no one questions it. You go to a concert, you are thrilled, and it is a quasi-religious experience, particularly if people really get themselves together and get the crowd moving. There is something incredibly intense about it. It makes no sense whatsoever. It is not an easy thing to understand. Music is deeply patterned, and patterned in layers, and I think that has something to do with it because reality is patterned in layers. So I think music represents reality in some fundamental way, and we get into the sway of that and sort of participate in being. That is part of what makes it such an uplifting experience. But we do not really know that is what we are doing. We just go do it. And it is nourishing for people, young people in particular. Lots of them live for music. It is where they derive all their meaning, their cultural identity, everything that is nourishing comes from their affiliation with their music that is part of their cultural identity. That is an amazing thing.

The question still remains: Where does the information in dreams come from? I think it comes from watching the patterns everyone acts out. We watch that forever, and we have some representations of those patterns. That is part of our cultural history; that is what is embedded in stories, in fictional accounts of the story between good and evil, the bad guy and the good guy, the romance. These are canonical patterns of being for people, and they deeply affect us because they represent what it is we will act out in the world. Then we flesh that out with the individual information we have about ourselves and other people. It is as though there are waves of behavioral patterns that manifest themselves in the crowd across time, that great dramas are played on the crowd across time. The artists watch that, get intimations of what that is, and they write it down and tell us, and then we are a little clearer about what we are up to.

Take, for example, a great dramatist like Shakespeare. We know what he wrote is fiction, and then we say fiction is not true. But then you think, well wait a minute, maybe it is true like numbers are true. Numbers are an abstraction from the underlying reality, but no one in their right mind would really think numbers are not true. You could even make a case that the numbers are more real than the things they represent because the abstraction is so insanely powerful. Once you have mathematics, you are just deadly. You can move the world with mathematics. So, it is not obvious that the abstraction is less real than the more concrete reality. But if you take a work of fiction, like Hamlet, and say it is true because it is fiction, then you think, wait a minute, what kind of explanation is that? But maybe it is more true than nonfiction because it takes the story that needs to be told about you, and it extracts that out and says, “Look, here is something that is a key part of the human experience as such.” It is an abstraction from this underlying noisy substrate, and people are affected by it because they see the thing that is represented is part of the pattern of their being. That is the right way to think about it.

With these old stories, these ancient stories, it seems to me that process has been occurring for thousands of years. It is like we watched ourselves, and we extracted out some stories. We imitated each other, we represented that in drama, and then we distilled the drama, we got a representation of the distillation, and then we did it again at the end of that process. God only knows how long that took. They have traced some fairytales back 10,000 years in relatively unchanged form, and it certainly seems to me that the archaeological evidence suggests that the really old stories the Bible begins with are at least that old and likely embedded in the pre-history that is far older than that. You might think, well, how can you be so sure? The answer to that, in part is, cultures that do not change, like the ancient cultures, did not change as fast; they stayed the same. That is the answer. They keep their information moving generation to generation; that is how they stayed the same. We know again in the archaeological record there are records of rituals that have remained relatively unbroken for up to 20,000 years; it was discovered in caves of Japan that were set up for a particular kind of bear worship that was also characteristic of Western Europe. So these things can last for very long periods of time.

We are watching each other act in the world, and the question is: How long have we been watching each other? The answer to that, in some sense is, as long as there have been creatures with nervous systems. That is a long time. That is some hundreds of millions of years, perhaps longer than that, that we have been watching each other trying to figure out what we are up to across that entire span of time. Some of that knowledge is built right into our bodies, which is why we can dance with each other, for example, because understanding is not just something that you have as an abstraction; it is something that you act out. That is what children are doing when they are learning to rough and tumble play. They are learning to integrate their body with the body of someone else in a harmonious way, learning to cooperate and compete. That is all instantiated right into their body. It is not abstract knowledge; they do not know that they are doing that. They are just doing it. We can even use our body as a representational platform. So, we have been studying each other for a long time, abstracting out what it is that we are up to.

What should we be up to? That is an even more fundamental question. If you are going to live in the world, and you are going to do it properly, what does properly mean and who is it that you might go to about that? That is the right question. It is what everyone wants to know. How do you live in the world? Not, what is the world made of? How do you live in the world? It is the eternal question of human beings, and I guess we are the only species that has ever really asked that question because all the other animals just go and do whatever they do. But not us. It is a question for us. 

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Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 1993 to 1998 he served as assistant and then associate professor of psychology at Harvard. He is the international bestselling author of “Maps of Meaning,” “12 Rules For Life,” and “Beyond Order.” You can now listen to or watch his popular lectures on DailyWire+.

Be sure to PRE-ORDER Dr. Peterson’s newest book: “We Who Wrestle with God” (Portfolio/Penguin. November 19, 2024.)