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Jack Roycroft-Sherry's avatar

Have you read Whitehead? I talked to Matt Segall recently about Whitehead, God and reality's trajectory (the podcasr will come out soon). It feels relevant to this. A lot of the things I've been thinking about recently have been making me want to go back to your work. So I'm glad you posted this, it's great !

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Graham L's avatar

Wonderful. Brilliant. I look forward to reading the entire book in due course. I was thinking recently of how misunderstood or under-appreciated Dr Peterson is. The superficial, or those not capable (through no real fault of their own) of critical or deep thinking, started by embracing this "self-help phenomenon" - but without ever reading or at least part-understanding Maps of Meaning, or taking any notice of his constantly repeated advice in various lectures to read Erich Neumann or Jung or Mircea Eliade, or trying to grapple with them - have ended up accusing him of either having "lost it", because they can't follow his evolving thinking processes, or having a go at him for "not being a proper Christian" and wholeheartedly taking on the propositional superstitions of established religious institutions. They had listened to his Genesis lectures - which never once, not once, included any silly suggestions about embracing creeds or propositions - and flooded back into Churches - which he just never told people to do; he only supported the "social glue" of respecting ancient traditions, rituals and writings. They never really listened to or understood anything he said about e.g. resurrection, as a permanent archetype pre-dating Christianity, and with symbolic significance for natural and psychological transformation, not as something you could have videotaped with a camcorder and a time machine. And now the more fundamentalist types feel somehow let down by him and accuse him of just "psychologizing" the Biblical stories whereas they of course "know" that the Bible is "objectively true" - never having read about or grappled with its internal contradictions, the idea that preachers and writers actually have psychological agendas of their own, especially when writing a Gospel or a tract to those either already faithful or intended to be converted - as if you can't "psychologize the Bible"! It seems to me that they want him to be a New-Testament propagandist but he seems to me more like an Old Testament prophet - somebody who wandered in from the desert and started telling people what's what whether they like it or not. And it doesn't seem to occur to them that if you want to "go back to Christianity" and "blame" Dr Peterson you can do so, but his phenomenon is so much larger than that, because if you want to abandon long-discredited historical claims - but still accept that it means something serious to your life and your society if you always aim at the highest - then you can also "blame" the influence of Dr Peterson, without having to start repeating creeds that you couldn't take seriously if you've done any historical/literary research of your own. So he's more important than superstition, or pure propositional claims. It seems to me that your work will build on this in important ways, as a kind of "unofficial sequel" to Maps of Meaning, although I am not for a moment trying to constrain or judge what you need to say and explain, as I have no right to do any such thing for something I have not yet read in full. I certainly have no intention of causing any kind of offense to either you or Dr Peterson by suggesting such a thing; the comment comes from a place of appreciation and great respect for both of you.

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