Pride Rock

But every time I show it to one of my friends and he's like, oh, okay.

And then you can put this thing over by Pride Rock over there.

And I'm just like, why am I asking you for help with this? It calls my base Pride Rock.

I'm like, you don't even play this game.

Get out of here.

I showed you this map before and I wanted to I produced this map because I I was trying to understand the fundamental substructure of the mythological world I think that's the right way of thinking about it And I'm not claiming that this is the only way it can be represented because I know full well that it can be represented other ways But it's a pretty good schema and so the idea it maps on to yeah, it maps onto this idea, so you can imagine that when you're here, you're in explored territory okay, so explored territory, you can do... explored territory in an archaic way is the fire's at the center, the campfire, and the tribal boundary surrounds that space and that's safe space, okay, so it's a place in nature, obviously, within which there's a pyramid and there's a fire at the center of the pyramid, and the pyramid is the dominance hierarchy the social dominance hierarchy, and that's where people live that's the world, and so you could say, well that's circumscribed space where you understand, see, it's the, it's explored territory not only because you understand the natural world that prevails there and the cumulative effort of all of your compatriots keeps all the terrible animals at bay so it's actually safe from a natural perspective and you understand it, so it's explored when you're there, you're safe and good things happen to you, mostly but it isn't just the natural space construed as the environment it's the natural space construed of the relationship between you and all the other primates that inhabit that space which is also, it's society obviously, but it's also part of nature and so, that explored territory is your understanding of the natural world and the social world, but more importantly, the concordance of your understanding with what's happening in that space so, like take this place for example right now, everyone of you has expectations about what's going to happen in this classroom and you bring those, they're desires actually, they're not merely expectations, because it's goal directed and you bring those with you into the classroom, and as long as what's happening is in concordance with those desires, then you're safe and calm and maybe at least mildly interested, which would be the point, right, so it's explored territory, because what you understand matches what's happening and that's a place, and it's a place that you strive to be and you strive to maintain, and maybe you even strive to expand, which is a slightly different thing but you certainly strive to maintain it, that's this, that's one place then there's another place, which is where you end up when that doesn't work and you can think about that as, well, you know, in the Lion King, for example when Mufasa, Mufasa brings Simba up to the top of Pride Rock just when the sun is either rising or setting, and so they're on top of the rock, and the top of the rock is lit and they're sitting at the top, in the light and Mufasa tells Simba that his territory is everything that the light touches and everything that the light touches is everything that you've understood, it's everything that your capacity for illumination and enlightenment has turned into habitable space and so you're the king of that domain, right, especially insofar as you're guided by the light, that's what that little scene meant and Mufasa tells Simba not to go out beyond where the light has touched into the dark territories and that's where the elephant graveyard is in that story, right, and Simba and Nella go out there, because of course as soon as you tell a human being not to do something those little lions being human beings after all they immediately run off and do it, and that's an echo of the story, say, in Genesis, where God tells Adam and Eve not to eat the apple, and it's the first thing they immediately do, because if you want someone not to do something, you first specify what it is that they shouldn't do, and then give them some sort of incomprehensible reason for why they shouldn't do it, and they'll just do it instantly, because that's what we're like, right? that's why the Catholics are convinced that people suffer from original sin and it's a very intelligent way of looking at things, although it also has its problems so anyways, there's the known territory, and then outside of that there's unknown territory Those are the most fundamental elements of existence There's the place you are when you know what's going on and there's the place you are when you don't know what's going on and that can be mapped onto Geographic territory if you go on beyond the borders of your society then you're in unknown territory But it can also be mapped conceptually so that for example We're all sitting in this room and someone leaps in with a weapon It's like this was known territory a second ago, and now it's not known territory at all even though you'd say, well, many things have remained the same it's like, yeah, but all the relevant things have suddenly changed, right? and so part of the way of conceptualizing that is that you can manifest a geographic transformation by moving from, you know, genuine geographic explored territory into genuine geographic unexplored territory but you can do that in time as well because we exist in time as well as space and so a space that's stable and unchanging can be transformed into something completely other than it is by the movement forward of time so, well, so, why am I telling you that? it's because we've mapped the idea of the difference in space between the known and the unknown to the difference in time between a place that works now and a place that no longer works even though it's the same place, it's the same thing, it's just extended across time Alright, and so that's order versus chaos, and that's the chaos that can manifest itself within the order, the thing that's represented in the yin and yang symbol, right, because you see the black paisley with the white dot in it, and the white paisley with the black dot in it.

Order can turn into chaos at a moment's notice, and in the same way, chaos can turn to order in a moment's notice, at a moment's notice.

And so, we're trying to map the geography onto something that's more abstract and comprehensive and we do that using conceptual schemes that we evolved over vast spans of time and have just moved up one level of abstraction known territory or what's explored, unknown territory or what's not explored the transformation or the dissolution of one into the other, and then the reconstitution of that that's what an election does, right? it's like, okay, we have our leader, who's the person at the top of the dominance hierarchy and defines the nature of this particular structure, there's an election it's regulated chaos, no one knows what's going to happen, it's the death of the old king bang, we go into a chaotic state, everyone argues for a while and then out of that argument, they produce a consensus, and poof, we're in a new state Right? That's the meta-story, right? Order, chaos, order.