Potential by Jordan Peterson

In a TED talk, Jordan Peterson was speaking on human potential. The last part of the talk was so encouraging, I had to put it down in print. He said:

'The idea is: if you follow the thing that manifests itself to you as interesting, it will lead you through adversity. It will lead you to do things that are difficult but not beyond your capacity because it is tempered for that. What will happen is that as you hit yourself against the world, pursuing what you are interested in; you will tap yourself into alignment. Your molecules and internal structure will become non-contradictory, like the internal structure of a jewel which is something that reflects light that makes you hard and durable and able to bear the terrible conditions of existence without becoming corrupt'

Note:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLeWutitFM

Don't Move by Margaret Mazzantini

Jordan Peterson on the Joe Rogan Experience spoke about how there are three levels people engage with the world. There is childhood, the tribe and the individual. Timoteo, the protagonist in the book, is better understood in this way. I think he is stuck in the tribe part of his life and his unhappiness or general dissatisfaction with life is due to this. Every decision he has made: becoming a surgeon, getting married, dutiful husband, devoted son and doting father have been what society has asked of him. He has willingly obliged until now. He finds that his life is rather stifling. He has an affair with Talia, a woman life dealt a bad hand to. She doesn't expect much from life and doesn't expect much from him either. He constantly degrades her in his mind, calling her a whore, prostitute and synonyms ad nauseum. He does this because it's the only way he can live with himself. He has to believe she is less than in his mind so he can justify his treatment of her. He treats her with contempt and yet he is the one who continues returning to her time and time again. She is generally very apathetic and so she hardly chases him. He is drawn to her because she is a conduit for him to become himself; to enter the third stage. Engaging with the world as an individual requires you to deal with all aspects of yourself including the Jungian shadow self. In the words of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, 'the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.' In order for Timoteo to actualize in the individual stage, he has to contend with his shadow self. Eckhart Tolle says 'Whatever you accept completely, you go beyond'. He has to come vis-à-vis with his own malevolence, to wrestle with it and emerge transformed on the other side. He had to become meek as described by Jordan Peterson; to be fully aware of one's propensity for violence and choose not to exercise it. It is to carry a metaphorical sword and be able to competently wield it but choose to keep it in its sheath. 

Timoteo's  maturity as an individual spells destruction for Talia but there was a willingness in her as well. She seems to have given herself to him as a sacrifice. She knew she would die but dying for his becoming gave her little life meaning. As though her mortality was immortalized through him. It reminds me of a paragraph I read in Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns:

'Mariam wished for so much in those final moments. Yet as she closed her eyes, it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that washed over her. She thought of her entry into this world, the harami child of a lowly villager, an unintended thing, a pitiable, regrettable accident. A weed. And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last. No. It was not so bad, Mariam thought, that she should die this way. Not so bad. This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate beginnings.'

Esther Perel (Author of The Mating Game and The State of Affairs) is known to say 'sex is not something you do, it is a place you go to'. Similarly, Ayn Rand wrote:

'Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a person's sexual choice is the result and sum of their fundamental convictions. Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves. No matter what corruption they're taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which they cannot perform for any motive but their own enjoyment - just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity! - an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exultation, only on the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces them to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and accept their real ego as their standard of value. They will always be attracted to the person who reflects their deepest vision of themselves, the person whose surrender permits them to experience - or to fake - a sense of self-esteem .. Love is our response to our highest values - and can be nothing else.'

It then comes as no surprise that Timoteo and Talia's relationship is a sexual one. Necessarily. Sex is a fundamental way to access our deepest selves, to somehow manipulate the ether, to transcend, to enter liminal spaces. The song Holy Room by Somi encapsulates this whole idea. When you slow down and pay attention during sex,you notice the shift. It hits you that you have crossed over a rubicon and are forever changed. This is the place where you take off your shoes; not just to honour the other person who is helping you peel back the layers and reveal your hidden self but also to honour yourself by being aware and learning things about yourself it would be hard to otherwise learn.

NOTES:

[1] Don't Move by Margaret Mazzantini

https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Move-Margaret-Mazzantini/dp/1400034663

[2] A Thousand Splendid suns by Khaled Hosseini

https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Splendid-Suns-Khaled-Hosseini/dp/159448385X

https://www.takealot.com/a-thousand-splendid-suns/PLID4610591

[3] Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel

https://www.amazon.com/Mating-Captivity-Unlocking-Erotic-Intelligence/dp/0060753641

https://www.takealot.com/mating-in-captivity-unlocking-erotic-intelligence/PLID34707221

[4] The State of Affairs by Esther Perel

https://www.takealot.com/the-state-of-affairs-rethinking-infidelity/PLID44117598

https://www.amazon.com/State-Affairs-Rethinking-Infidelity/dp/006322583

[5] Joe Rogan Experience #1208- Jordan Peterson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vleFt88Hm8s

[6] Somi- Holy Room

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCFxVi_bolg

The people in the trees by Hanya Yanagihara

I chose this book for two reasons mainly. The first being that, A Little Life, another title from the same author was simply remarkable and secondly, I am in a season of my life where I am thoroughly obsessed with trees. This was sparked by Richard Powers, The Overstory, a book so intricately interwoven around trees with characters from various walks of life. A redemptive book for mankind because it reminds us that there are still human beings who are able to see the trees for the trees. They are able to see beyond the ecoservices trees provide and see another part of awe-inspiring creation just as they too are. They afford trees the reverence that human beings afford each other. The people in the trees however leans on the side of irreverence. There is one particular theme that I wanted to concentrate on from the book. The inability for human beings to tread lightly on the planet. 

Norton Perina travels to U'ivu, a remote Micronesian island looking for a tribe that has not been seen in a long time. Norton and his companions find the tribe but also make another discovery. They realise that the members of the tribe are able to live to never-been-heard-of ages such as 170. This is owed to a rare species of turtle that the tribe consumes during a particular ceremony. The turtles are only found in a single lake in the deepest parts of the jungle. When their time on the island is up; Norton kills and sneaks off with one of the turtles so he could carry out more research on the inexplicable lifespan of the tribe. Norton returns to the states, sets up lab and conducts a study on rats to see if their lifespan would be prolonged as well. Norton's research becomes successful but before he publishes, Tallent (a U'ivuan anthropologist) asks Norton to not publish his findings because it would change everything. Norton publishes regardless and it starts a cascade of unfavourable changes. U'ivu was once a jungle full of lush, verdant plants, teeming with life where the communities were foraging, had a few needs and lived communally and it all completely changed. 

This is what Norton said when he described how the island changed: 

'Shall I tell you of the years of feckless, fruitless, desperate attempts to recreate the effect using every sort of turtle on the planet? Of months waiting for the mice to continue beyond their natural lifespan, and then, upon watching them die, beginning anew, a new Hawaiian sea turtle, a new leatherback turtle, a new Galapos tortoise? Shall I tell you about trying to re-create the effect using every animal, every plant, every fungus, that could be harvested from Ivu'ivu? The sloths, the hogs, the spiders, the vuakas, the toucans, the parrots, the hunonos, the manamas, the kanavas, the weird lizardlike things, the fuzzy gourds, the palm leaves, the seedpods? Shall I tell you how the island was stripped of everything, whole forests razed, whole fields of mushrooms and orchids and ferns picked like fat red strawberries and shiny green lettuces and loaded onto the helicopters that were now able to land directly on the island because so many trees had been felled that there was open space aplenty?

Shall I tell you how there are really no new stories in cases like these: how the men turned to alcohol, how the women neglected their handiwork, how they grew fatter and coarser and lazier, how the missionaries plucked them from their houses as easily as one would pick an overripe apple from a branch? Shall I tell you of the venereal diseases that seemed to come from nowhere but, once introduced, never left? Shall I tell you how I witnessed these things myself, how I kept returning and returning, long after the grant money had disappeared, long after the people had lost interest, long after the island had gone from being an Eden to becoming what it was, what it is: just another Micronesian ruin, once so full of hope, now somehow distasteful and embarrassing like a beautiful woman who has grown fleshy and sparse-haired and moustached?'

An entire ecosystem was ruined in the name of profit. Beauty and simplicity were sacrificed in the name of profit. Human beings value things for their apparent utility and how much of that utility can be commodified. This kind of thinking though is pervasive and meanders into everything else including other people i.e. slavery. In Karen Joy Fowler's book, We are all completely beside ourselves, another book that navigates the relationship between human beings and nature (in this case other primates), she says something that I found profound. How the most important part of the words human being is the being part not the human part. The other inhabitants of our planet should be valued too, primarily, for their beingness. 

Joe Rogan has had Forrest Galante on his show a couple of times. There are things they've spoken about on the show that have tied in beautifully with the theme being discussed here. Forrest Galante spends most of his time exploring the world searching for extinct animals or animals that haven't been seen in a while. Interestingly, on the show he describes how he recently 'found' the Galapos turtle on an expedition that hadn't been seen in 113 years. Human beings are largely responsible for the extinction of a large number of species. The North American buffalo(bison) were hunted so the Sioux would be starved into submission. Even though the dodo was not hunted out of existence as we were once led to believe, human beings still played a huge role in its extinction. The Dutch sailors brought rats and other animals that ate dodo eggs and competed with the dodo for food. There was also a mass exportation of wood from Mauritius which deforested the dodo's habitat and left the animals exposed to other animals and harsh weather conditions. The silverback gorilla in Rwanda almost became extinct because the genocides were driving the Tutsi into the forest; man and beast could not live in close proximity to each other and beast suffered as a result. The list goes on but these are but a few examples. Joe and Rogan were discussing how the population of feral pigs in Hawaii have grown exponentially and how this has major implications for agriculture, indigenous plants and other animals like the mosquito. All these pigs can be traced to pigs bought from oversees by settlers. 

Even when human beings try to help, they usually hurt particularly when they are ill-informed about a matter. In Karen's aforementioned book, she wrote about how in 1979, more than a thousand seal pups were sprayed with permanent red dye by crew members from the Sea Shepherd who thought that by ruining the seals' pelts, they could save the seals from hunters. Sure their pelts were destroyed but this also made them easier to be seen by predators. I've heard that sharks are especially attracted to high-contrast colours. As I've previously stated, however, there are redemptive moments for the human race. There are people, who are working very hard in conservation, but these are people who are not just acting impulsively but are considerate in the work that they are doing. There was a YouTube video that trended where the audience was led to believe that a polar bear in the artic was spray painted with a red cross. This was a gimmick to draw attention to how polar bears are endangered and to raise funds towards their conservation. It is with great relief to most of us that no polar bears were spray painted. Joe asked Forrest if he has to choose between seeing an endangered species dead or not ever seeing it even though it existed; which would he choose? Forrest, in a heartbeat, said he would rather not ever see it as long as it existed. This is such a lesson in humility especially in our 'if it can't be measured, it doesn't exist' world. At the end of his last Stanford lectures, Robert Sapolsky, shared a legend among archaeologists that has remained with me since. Legend has it that when archaeologists excavate a site, they don't excavate the entire area. They leave half of the site for the next archaeologists. When we are able to consider others and not want to destroy everything in one fell swoop because we can; when everything does not have to be commodified, when other things can just be let be without interference or opinion really. Even though Christopher Ryan's words in Civilized to Death ring true, 'the garden of Eden has been long paved over', we still can tread lightly on this sacred land that is our planet.  

Notes:

1. The people in the trees by Hanya Yanagihara

    https://www.amazom.com/dp/0345803310/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_awdb_AovmEbZFVS87P

    https://www.takealot.com/the-people-in-the-trees/PLID38334659

2. The Overstory by Richard Powers

    https://www.amazon.com/dp/03936363552X/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_awdb_ssvmEb4BNTPV7

    https://www.takealot.com/the-overstory/PLID5421309

3. We are all completely beside ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

    https://www.amazon.com/dp/0142180823/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_awdb_AxvmEb4Y360Y5

    https://www.takealot.com/we-are-all-completely-beside-ourselves-ebook/PLID38334659

4. Joe Rogan Experience: Forrest Galante #1403

    https://youtu.be/tCRjzlfyOE4

5. Civilized to death by Christopher Ryan

    https://www.amazon.com/dp/1451659105/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_awdb_9AvmEbWK26IQ2

    https://www.takealot.com/civilized-to-death/PLID42027122

6. Robert Sapolsky lecture on Individual Differences

    https://youtu.be/PpDqIWUtAw