TRANSCRIPT
I just got back from a trip to the ancient world, Athens and the Greek islands. I’ve always been captivated by the ancient Greeks because they truly were curious about the world and man’s place in the world. I learned that their view was that life had three levels: the world of wild animals, the world of humans and domesticated animals, and the gods and goddesses. So they believed they could actually run into a God after they thought, “oh, he was born here.” And you know, even though they lived on Mount Olympus, it wasn’t heaven; it was Mount Olympus. It was a real place.
I was thinking that’s analogous. Even though I’m not a big fan of Freud, sometimes he was right that there’s three levels. There’s our id, that like the wild beasts; there’s the ego, like humans and domesticated animals; and then there was a super-ego, like the gods and goddesses.
I think the id I really would interpret that now as the traumatized child who is abandoned by parents, abandoned by meaning, and doesn’t have the adult capacity to hold itself in care and meaning. So the traumatized child acts out in a wild way. I mean, you know, you look at the, read any newspaper, you see the crime and the ways people act out. It’s all childhood trauma.
So the wild beast is actually the self that is so wounded and angry and hurt. An angry, wounded child does not have morality; it’s angry, hurt, and looking for actually love and limits. But in the meat festival, it just will wreak havoc out of its anger and abandonment.
So that’s the in part. Then the self is the ego, and that’s the part that starts to become aware that I am a person. I have an adult capacity, but I’m very hurt, and I need to start to build a relationship with that hurt child. When that hurt child starts to feel like finally there’s an adult in the picture who has some limits, who can say no in a meaningful way, like “no, you can’t just act out,” and I know why you’re acting out because this happened in your childhood—this, this, this, these wounds, these betrayals, mainly by your mother and father. So you should feel angry; they broke you. It’s just that we’re starting to realize that you fix it; they broke it.
That’s that self that starts to negotiate. And then what happens is that I feel implicit in us, as much as our instincts, our animal instincts—which Freud was into: sex and aggression, sex and power—are just as implicit in us as our sense of ethics and altruism. They are our ideals. But when we’re traumatized, we’re so split off from all that we can’t get into it.
So that is the gods and goddesses. Even though in the Greeks, the gods and goddesses were also acting out, the sense that there is a higher self, which often holy people and religious traditions are often depicted with halos, they’re a higher order of being. That is this aspect of our humanity, which is just as real as our instincts are these ideals. It’s just that we’re so traumatized that we, this ego, this person, which really is between our higher and lower aspects, until that person starts to take charge, there’s no communication between the two.
We need our instincts to keep us grounded on the planet, and we need our ideals to inspire our instincts. Our instincts need to be inspired by our ideals, and our ideals need to be grounded by our instincts. This makes us human.