"And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept.
And God took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh instead thereof,
and the rib which the Lord God had taken from man
made he a woman and brought her unto the man.
And Adam said, this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.
She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.
Therefore shall a man leave his father
and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh."
That's a walloping statement,
to put in there at the end of those three sentences.
Therefore, comes as somewhat of a surprise,
but there's an injunction there...
Well, it's a good injunction, man.
I'll tell you, people who don't do that,
they have a hell of a time in their marriage.
And so this is a good thing to know if you
are married or if you're planning to get married.
It's like...
We have very strong orientation towards our parents, and for good reason.
It's like the injunction here is
that's secondary as soon as you're married.
And failure to do that makes your marriage collapse.
And then you deserve it to collapse, too, as far as I'm concerned,
because it's a reflection of your pathological immaturity and your
unwillingness to extract yourself from the telling like grip of parents
who are a little bit too much on the interfering side.
But the injunction, there's a deep injunction here.
It's very complicated.
So one of the ideas is that the original Adam wasn't a man like a separate man.
It was more like a hermaphroditic being.
And in that hemaphroditic being, there was a kind of undifferentiated perfection.
And then that was split into male and female.
And then part of the goal of human beings is to reunite that as the singular unity
that reestablishes the initial perfection.
And that's actually the goal of marriage from a spiritual perspective.
And you could read about that if you read Jung
because he wrote quite a bit about that.
It's lovely... It's such a good idea.
So I had these friends that went to Sweden to get married.
They were from Northern Alberta,
but his heritage, they're both heritage were Swedish.
And in this ceremony, they did this cool thing as they were
being married, and they had to hold a candle up between them.
Right? While they were being married.
And you think, well, okay, what's the candle?
It's a source of light, source of illumination.
Right? Source of enlightenment.
It's the candle that you put on Christmas trees in Europe.
So it's the light that emerges in the darkness and the depth of winter.
It's a symbol of life in darkness.
It's the reemergence of the sun at the...
darkest, coldest time of the year, which is also associated symbolically
with the birth of Christ for all sorts of complicated reasons.
And so the candle is all that.
And then the next question is, why do you hold it above you?
And the answer is, because what's above you is what you're below to.
So it single simplifies, something transcendent.
And so why do you both hold on to it?
Because you're both supposed to hold on to the light, right?
And you're supposed to be subordinate to the light.
And so you ask, well, who's in charge of the marriage?
Well, the light. That's the idea.
So you come together as one thing.
You're no longer two things.
It isn't what's good for you, and it's not what's good for your wife.
It's what's good for the marriage.
And the marriage is about the combined being, which is the reassembly
of the original hermaphroditic being at the beginning of time.
That's the idea.
And that's all packed into, like, these four sentences.
And there's been...
Well, all of these sentences have tremendous history of interpretation
associated with the rights just endless and endless and endless.
And that's one of the lines.
So it's also an antidote to the idea that women taken out of men,
which is obviously the reverse of the biological process, by the way,
makes women in some sense subordinate to men.
That is not built into this text.
I don't see that at all is built into the text.
And there's something else that's associated with it, too.
And there's an idea that...
You know in... In Sleeping Beauty...
Sleeping Beauty goes to sleep.
And the reason she goes to sleep is
because you have to remember what happens is: she has parents who are quite old,
and so they're pretty desperate to have a child like so many people are now.
And they only have one child, like so many people do now.
And they don't want anything to happen to this child
because like, hey, it's a miracle.
And there's only one of them.
She's the Princess.
And so it's like we're not letting anything around her.
So they have a big christening party, right?
And they invite everybody, but they don't invite Maleficent.
And Maleficent is the terrible mother. She's nature.
She's like the thing that goes bump in the night.
She's the devil herself, so to speak.
She's everything that you don't want your child to encounter.
So the King and Queen are saying, well, we just won't invite her to the christening.
It's like, good luck with that.
That's an oedipal story, right?
The oedipal mother is the mother who devours her child by refusing,
by overprotecting him or her,
so that instead of being strengthened
by an encounter with the terrible world,
they're weakened by too much protection.
And then when they're let out into the world, they cannot live.
And that's the story of Sleeping Beauty.
And that's what the King and Queen do.
And they apologize to Maleficent when she first shows up and say, well,
they have a bunch of half witted excuses why they don't invite her.
"We forgot." It's like, I don't think so.
You don't forget something like that.
And she kind of makes that point. It's right...
The whole horror of life,
you don't forget about that when you have a child, that's for sure.
You might wish that it would stay at bay, but you do not forget about it.
The question is, do you invite it to the party?
And the answer is, it bloody well depends how unconscious you want your child to be.
And if you want your child to be unconscious, well, then you have the added
advantage that maybe they won't leave home.
And so you can take advantage of them for the rest of your sad life instead
of going off to find something to do for yourself.
Well, and then, of course, you can take revenge on them if they do
have any..any, what would we call, impetus towards courage
that you sacrificed yourself 30 years ago
and want to stamp out as soon as you see it developing your child.
That's another thing that would be quite pleasant.
And so that's what happens in Sleeping Beauty.
Yeah, well, none of this is pleasant.
And nothing that happens in that story is pleasant.
So Sleeping Beauty, she's naive as Hell.
They put her out in the forest and have her raised by these three like goody two
shoes fairies that are also completely devoid of any real potency and power.
There's nothing malificient about them.
And then the first idiot Prince that wanders by, she falls in love with so
badly that she has post traumatic stress disorder when he rides off on his horse.
Right? That's what happens.
And then she goes into the Castle and she's all freaked out because she met
the love of her life for like 5 minutes, for God's sake.
And that's when the spinning wheel,
that's the wheel of fate pops up and she pricks her finger, right?
They try to get rid of all the spinning wheels.
They try to get rid of all the wheels of fate with their pointed end.
But she finds that poke, pricks her fingers and finger falls down unconscious.
Well, she wants to be unconscious.
And no bloody wonder. She was protected her whole life.
She's so damn naive that her first love affair just about kills her.
She wants to go to sleep and never wake up.
And so that's exactly what happens.
And then she has to wait for the Prince to come and rescue her.
Well, you think, how sexist can you get that story?
Well, seriously, because that's the way
that would be read in the modern world.
It's like she doesn't need a Prince to rescue her?
That's why Disney made Frozen,
that absolutely appalling piece of rubbish.
So you can say, well, the Princess doesn't need a Prince to rescue her.
But that's a boneheaded way of looking
at the story because the Prince isn't just a man who's coming to rescue the woman.
And believe me, he's got his own problems
right, he's got a whole goddamn Dragon he has to contend with.
But the Prince also represents the woman's own consciousness.
The consciousness is presented very
frequently in stories as symbolically masculine as it is with the logos idea.
And the idea is that without that forward going, courageous consciousness,
a woman herself will drift into unconsciousness and terror.
And so you can read it as well.
The woman who's sleeping needs a man to wake her up.
And of course, just like a man needs a woman to wake him up.
It's the same damn thing. That's the dragonfite in Sleeping Beauty.
But it's also the case that if she's only unconscious, all she can do is lay there
and sleep like the sleep of the naive and damned.
She has to wake herself up and bring her
own consciousness, her own masculine consciousness,
into the forefront so that she can survive in the world.
And of course, women are trying to do that like mad.
But that's partly what's represented in a story like that.
And that's partly what's implicit in this idea is that unless the woman is taken out
of man, so to speak, then she isn't a human being.
She's just a creature.
And that's partly what's embedded in this story.
So you don't want to read it as a patriarchal...
You don't want to read anything that way.
So, really, I won't bother with that.
But really, we can do better than that.
"And therefore shall a man leave his father
and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh."
It's like, yeah.
The other thing about marriage, this is really worth knowing, too,
is that I learned this in part from reading Jung.
It's like, what do you do when you get married? That's easy.
You take someone who's just as useless and horrible as you are,
and then you shackle yourself to them,
and then you say...
"We're not running away, no matter what happens."
Yeah, well, that's perfect, because then you don't get to run away.
And the thing is, if you can run away,
you can't tell each other the truth, because if you tell someone the truth
about you and they don't run away, they weren't listening.
And so if you don't have someone around
that can't run away, then you can't tell them the truth.
And so that's part of the purpose of the marriage.
It's like, okay, I'll bet on you, you bet on me.
It's a losing bet. We both know that.
But given our current circumstances,
we're unlikely to find anyone better, that's for sure.
You know...
There are two things that come off of that.
One is people are waiting around to find Mr. or Mrs. Right.
It's like, here's something to think about, man,
to put yourself on your feet, right.
If you went to a party and you found Mr. Right
and he looked at you and didn't run away screaming,
that would indicate that he wasn't Mr. Right at all. Right?
It's like the old Nietzschean joke if someone loves you that should
immediately disenchant you with them.
Right? It's the Woody Allen joke.
I never belong to a club that would take me as a member.
That's a very interesting thing to think about and so you're going to shackle
yourself to someone who's just as imperfect as you are and then the issue is...
You might be in a situation where you can actually negotiate.
Because you might think well, there are some things about you
that aren't going so right and there's some things about me that aren't going so
right, and we're bloody well stuck with the consequences for the next 50 years.
So we can either straighten this out or we can suffer through it for the next
five decades and people are of the sort that without that degree of seriousness,
those problems will not be solved. You'll leave things unnamed,
because there's always an out.
It's like... And it's the same thing when you're living together with someone.
You know that people who live together before they're married are more
likely to get divorced, not less likely, and the reason for that is what exactly
are you saying to one another when you live with each other?
Just think about it.
Well...
For now...
You're better than anything else I can trick...
But I'd like to reserve the right to trade you in...
Conveniently, if someone better happens to stumble into me.
Well, how could someone not be insulted to their core by an offer like that?
Now they're willing to play along with it
Because they're going to do the same thing with you well, that's exactly it.
It's like, yeah, yeah. I know you're not going to commit to me so that means you don't
value me or our relationship above everything else but as long as I get
to escape if I need to then I'm willing to put up with that.
It's like, that's a hell of a thing...
You might think how stupid is it to shackle yourself to someone?
It's like it's stupid, man, there's no doubt about that.
But compared to...
It's pretty damn good.
Because without that shackling
there are things you will never ever learn because you'll avoid them.
You can always leave and if you can leave then you don't have to tell each other the truth.
It's as simple as that. Because you can just leave.
And there's and you don't have anyone you can tell the truth to....