We Who Wrestle with God

A revolutionary new offering from Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, renowned psychologist and author of the global bestseller In It is time for us to understand such things, scientifically and spiritually; to become conscious of the structure of our souls and our societies; and to see ourselves and others as if for the first time.;;; Join Elijah as he discovers the Voice of God in the dictates of his own conscience and Jonah confronting hell itself in the belly of the whale because he failed to listen and act. Set yourself straight in intent, aim, and purpose as you begin to more deeply understand the structure of your society and your soul. Journey with Dr. Peterson through the greatest stories ever told.;; Dare to wrestle with God.

Autorentext
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson’s books have sold millions of copies worldwide. The expansive tours that accompanied their publication have brought him in front of a quarter of a million people in some five hundred venues, and his online lectures and podcasts have been seen and heard by a billion viewers and listeners. Before becoming one of today’s most influential public intellectuals, he worked for decades as a professor, first at Harvard University and then the University of Toronto, and as a practicing clinical psychologist. He has published more than a hundred scientific papers on a range of topics including personality, criminal behavior, political and religious belief, and the neuroscience of perception, motivation, and emotion. He has developed a range of extraordinarily popular self-development, educational, and communication tools, including selfauthoring.com and understandmyself.com, Peterson Academy, and Essay.app. He lives in Toronto, Canada, with his wife, Tammy. They have two children and four grandchildren.

Leseprobe
1

In the Beginning

1.1. God as creative spirit

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Genesis 1:1-2

How is God presented as the great book of Genesis begins? As an animated spirit-creative, mobile, and active-something that does, and is. God is, in short, a character whose personality reveals itself as the biblical story proceeds.

Genesis opens with a confrontation. God is "moving" upon the face of the "waters." What does moving mean? It means God is mobile, obviously. Less obviously, moving is what we say when we have been struck by something deep. God is what has encountered us when new possibilities emerge and take shape. God is what we encounter when we are moved to the depths. What, then, does waters mean-particularly the waters that God has not yet created? That is the ancient Hebrew tehom or tohu va bohu: chaos; potential; what lurks but has not yet been revealed-as water is the precondition for life-but also harbors the unknown in its depths. God is therefore the spirit who faces chaos; who confronts the void, the deep; who voluntarily shapes what has not yet been realized, and navigates the ever-transforming horizon of the future. God is the spirit who engenders the opposites (light/darkness; earth/water), as well as the possibilities that emerge from the space between them:

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called the Seas: and God saw that it was good.

Genesis 1:6-10

And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:

And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.

Genesis 1:14-15

How might we, in human terms, understand this first encounter with God? What is He, and what is He confronting? Imagine, for a moment, what you face when you awaken in the morning. Your attention does not seize on the objects that surround you-on the banal reality of your bedroom furniture. Instead, you ruminate on the challenges and opportunities of the day. Perhaps you feel anxious, because there are simply too many things to deal with. Maybe (hopefully) you are in a better situation, and you look forward, instead, to the opportunities that present themselves. Your consciousness-your being-hovers over the potential offered to you by the new beginning of the morning in a manner akin to the conditions and process of creation itself, as portrayed in the opening verses of the Bible-a creation that continues with every glance you take and every word you utter. Through consciousness we process the domain of possible being-of becoming. That is the realm that inspires both hope, in our apprehension of positive things ahead, and anxiety, in the face of life's dreadful uncertainty.

Here is another way of understanding our confrontation with possibility. Imagine any object. Now imagine that there is a space surrounding that object consisting of what that object could become as time progresses and context shifts. Under normal conditions, the most likely future state of any familiar object-a bottle, a pen, the sun-can be predicted by its current state. With a vicious twist of fate, however, or a radical shift of aim, such constraints can be lifted, and the object's unrevealed possibility made apparent. A bottle in a raucous bar can become a deadly club or, smashed in anger, a spear with the edges of a razor. A pen can become the mechanism of life itself when inserted into the trachea of someone choking. The sun can become not the stable and predictable giver of life and light that defines the days and nights we inhabit but the source of the solar storm that brings down the electrical grid on which we so fragilely depend.

It is that breadth of possibility that consciousness confronts and processes when it apprehends the world and determines to act on it. Our movement forward in time is therefore no mechanical procession through a realm of stable actuality. Consciousness deals with what could yet realize itself in exactly the way the spirit of God deals with the void and formless deep; in the way the divine contends with the massa confusa that is chaos and opportunity and the matrix from which all forms emerge.

God is equally that which (or who) creates not only order but, as is stressed repeatedly throughout the opening book of the biblical corpus, the order that is good. On the first day, he establishes the separation between light and darkness (Genesis 1:3-4). On the second, he creates the dome of heaven, separating the lower waters, the terrestrial, and the upper waters, the source of rain (Genesis 1:6-8). On the third, the terra firma we inhabit is gathered together and separated from what then becomes the oceans, and plants appear on the ground (Genesis 1: 9-13). On the fourth day,

God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,

And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.

Genesis 1:16-18

On the fifth day, the fish and birds appear (Genesis 1:20-23). All this creation, despite its pristine quality or goodness, is still striving upward, developing further, as indicated on the sixth and last da…