Treat Yourself Like Someone You Are Responsible for Helping

I learned two very important lessons from Carl Jung about “doing unto others as you would have them do unto you” or “loving your neighbour as yourself”. The first lesson is that neither of these statements has anything to do with being nice. The second was  that both are equations, rather than injunctions.

The oldest story and the Nature of the World

In Genesis I – the “Priestly” – God created the cosmos , using His divine Word. To understand Genesis I with its insistence on speech as the fundamental creative force, it is first necessary to review a few fundamental, ancient assumptions. Because we are so scientific now – and determinedly materialistics – it is very difficult for us to understand that other ways of seeing can and do exist. But before the dawn of the scientific worldview , reality was constructed differently. Being was understood as a place of action, not a place of things. It was understood as something more akin to a story or drama. That story or drama was lived, subjective experience , as it manifested itself moment to moment in the consciousness of every living person. It is such things, experienced personally, that are the most fundamental elements of human life, from the archaic, dramatic perspective. It is the drama of lived experience – the unique , tragic, personal death of your father, compared to the objective death listed in the hospital records. 

The Domain, Not of Matter, but of What Matters

The scientific world of matter can be reduced , in some sense, to its fundamental constituents: molecules and atoms. However, the world of experience has primal constituents, as well. One of these is chaos. Another is order. The third is the process that mediates between the two, which appears identical to what modern people call consciousness. It is our eternal subjection to the first two that makes us doubt the validity of existence – that makes us throw our hands in despair, and fail to care for ourselves properly. It is proper understanding of the third that allows us the only real way out. 

Chaos is unexplored territory. Chaos is the hidden anger of your mother, the sickness of your child, the despair you feel when you have been betrayed. It is the place you end up when things fall apart; when your dreams die, your career collapses, or your marriage ends. Chaos is where we are when we do not know where we are, and what we are doing when we do not know what we are doing. It is , in short, all those things and situations we neither know nor understand. Chaos is also the formless potential from which the God of Genesis I called forth order using language at the beginning of the time. It is the same potential from which we, made in that Image, call forth the novel and ever-changing moments of our lives. And Chaos is freedom, dreadful freedom, too. 

Order, by contrast, is explored territory. That is the hundreds-of-millions-of years-old hierarchies of place, position and authority. It is the structure of society. The structure provided by biology. Order is tribe, religion, hearth, home and country. It is your plan for the day, the value of currency, the calendar, the clock, the schedule of trains, the rows of desks in the classroom. Order is the place where all things turn out the way we want them to. But order is sometimes tyranny and stultification, as well, when the demand for certainty and uniformity becomes too one-sided. 

Where everything is certain, we are in order. We are there when things are going according to plan and nothing is new and disturbing. In the domain of order, things behave as God intended. There, things work, and we are stable, calm and competent. We seldom leave places we understand – geographical or conceptual – for that reason, and we certainly do not like it when we are compelled to or when it happens accidentally. 

You are in order, when you have a loyal friend. When the same person betrays you, you move from the daytime world of clarity and light to the dark underworld of chaos, confusion and despair. Or when you lose your job, or  you are subject to a tax audit. Chaos is the new place and time that emerges when tragedy strikes suddenly, or malevolence reveals its paralyzing visage, even in the confines of your own home. 

Chaos and Order: Personality, Female and Male

Things or objects are part of the objective world. They are inanimate, spiritless. Chaos and order, on the other hand, are perceived, experienced and understood (to the degree that they are understood at all)  as personalities. And this is true for modern people as for their ancient forebears. It is just that modern people do not notice. 

We evolved , over millennia, within intensely social circumstances. This means that the most significant elements of our environment of origin were personalities, not things. Male and female, parent and child are categories, for us – natural categories, deeply embedded in our  perceptual, emotional and motivational structure. Our brains are deeply social. Other creatures were critically important to us as we lived, mated and evolved.Those creatures were literally our natural habitat – our environment. Thus, it appears that first we began to perceive the unknown, chaotic, non-human world with the innate categories of our social brain. 

Order, the known, appears symbolically associated with masculinity. Chaos – the unknown – is symbolically associated with the feminine. 

We already know all this, but we do not know we know it. Everyone understands order and chaos, world and underworld. We have all been in both places, many times: sometimes by happenstance, sometimes by choice. Many things begin to fall into place when you begin to consciously understand the world in this manner. 

The Taoist juxtaposition of yin and yang , does not simply portray chaos and order as the fundamental elements of Being – it also tells you how to act. The Way, the Taoist path of life, is represented by (or exists on) the border between the twin serpents. The Way is the path of proper Being. It is the same Way as that referred to by Christ in John 14:6: I am the way, and the truth  and the life. The same idea is expressed in Matthew 7:14: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way,which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. 

We eternally inhabit order, surrounded by chaos. To straddle that fundamental duality is to be balanced : to have one foot firmly planted in order and security and the other in chaos, possibility, growth and adventure. When life suddenly reveals itself as intense, gripping and meaningful; when time passes and you are so engrossed in what you are doing you do not notice  – it is there and then that you are located precisely on the border between order and chaos. 

Chaos and order are fundamental elements because every living situation is made of both. No matter who we are, Kalahari Desert -dweller or Wall Street banker, some things are under our control, and some things are not. 

Order is not enough. You can’t just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned. Nonetheless, chaos can be too much. You can not long tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you are learning what you still need to know. Thus you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. 

The Garden of Eden

8 In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. 16 And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”

The serpent in Eden means the same thing as the black dot on the yin side of the Taoist yin/yang symbol of totality- that is, the possibility of the unknown and revolutionary suddenly manifesting itself where everything appears calm. 

It just does not appear possible, even for God himself, to make a bounded space completely protected from outside. And even if we had defeated all the snakes that beset us from without, reptilian and human alike, we would still not have been safe. The snake inhabits each of our souls. This is the reason , as far as I can tell, for the strange Christian insistence, made most explicit by John Milton, that the snake in the Garden of Eden was also Satan, the Spirit of Evil itself. The works of all possible snakes is the eternal human proclivity for evil. The worst of all possible snakes is psychological, spiritual, personal, internal. As the great Russian writer Aleksander Solzhenitsyn insisted, the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. 

The Naked Ape

As the story insists, the original parents were naked, but not ashamed. Such phrasing implies first that it is perfectly natural and normal for people to be ashamed of their nakedness (otherwise nothing would have to be said about its absence) and second that there was something amiss , for better or worse, with our first parents. 

Our primordial parents hearkened to the snake. They ate the fruit. Their eyes open. THe both awoke. Adam and Eve wake up, but only enough to discover some terrible things. First, they notice that they are naked. 

What does it mean to know yourself naked – or, potentially worse, to know yourself and your partner naked? Naked means vulnerable and easily damaged. Naked means subject to judgment for beauty and health. Adam and Eve made themselves loincloths and kitted off and hid. In their vulnerability, now fully realized they felt unworthy to stand before God. 

That evening God calls Adam and he replies: I heard you, God. But I was naked, and I hid” . What does this mean? It means that people eternally fear to tell the truth, to mediate between chaos and order, and to manifest their destiny. God says, “Who told you that you are naked? Did you eat something you were not supposed to?”. And Adam, in his wretchedness, points right at Eve, his love, his partner, his soul-mate, and snitches on her. And then he blames God. He says: “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”How pathetic – and how accurate. Eva was deceived by the snake, and later it turns out, that snake is Satan himself. But Adam! Now one forced his words from his mouth. 

And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” 23 So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side[e] of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

Good and Evil 

When their eyes are opened, Adam and Eve come to know Good and Evil. What could that possibly mean? Predators kill things and eat them. It is just their nature. They do not bear responsibility for it. They are hungry, not evil. Only man will inflict suffering for the sake of suffering. Human beings have great capacity for wrongdoing. It is an attribute that is unique in the world of life. We can and do things worse, voluntarily, with full knowledge of what we are doing. And no one understands the darkness of the individual better than the individual himself. Who, then, when ill, is going to be fully committed to his own care? 

A Spark of the Divine

In Genesis 1 , God creates the world with the divine, truthful Word, generating order from the chaos. 

The original Man and Woman , existing in unbroken unity with their Creator, did not appear conscious (and certainly not self – conscious). Their eyes were not open. But, in their perfection, they were also less, not more, than their post-Fall counterparts. Their goodness was something bestowed, rather than deserved or earned. They exercised no choice. 

The entire Bible is structured so that everything after the Fall – the history of Israel, the prophets, the coming of Christ – is presented as a remedy for that Fall, a way out of evil. And what would that mean? The answer is already implicit in Genesis 1: to embody the Image of God – to speak out of chaos the Being that is Good – but to do so consciously, of our own free choice. 

Today it is easy to believe that people are arrogant, and egotistical, and always looking out for themselves. But many people shoulder intolerable burdens of self-disgust, self-contempt, shame and self-consciousness. They do not value themselves at all, and they do not take care of themselves with attention and skill. They believe that other people should not suffer , and they will work diligently and altruistically to help them alleviate it. 

I learned two very important lessons from Carl Jung about “doing unto others as you would have them do unto you” or “loving your neighbour as yourself”. The first lesson is that neither of these statements has anything to do with being nice. The second was  that both are equations, rather than injunctions. If I am someone’s friend, family member, or lover, then I am morally obliged to bargain as hard on my own behalf as they are on theirs. If I fail to do so, I will end up a slave, and the other person a tyrant. What good is that? It is much better for any relationship when both partners are strong. 

God himself claims: “Vengeance is mine, I will repay”. According to this philosophy, you do not simply belong to yourself. You are not simply your own possession to torture and mistreat. 

We deserve some respect. We are important to other people , as much to ourselves. You are, therefore, morally obliged to take care of yourself. We are – according to Genesis – made in His image. You  have a spark of divine in you and you can make order from chaos – and vice versa – in your way, with your words. Define who you are. Refine your personality .Choose your destination and articulate your Being. 

You could begin by treating yourself as if you were someone you were responsible for helping. 

12 Rules For Life | Jordan Peterson

Rule # 1: Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping