Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

Anyways, anyways, he said, imagine you gave an alien scientist...

a bird, a dead bird, and he said, what could this scientist conclude about, what could the alien, who'd never seen the Earth, let's say, conclude about the Earth from analyzing the bird?

And the answer is, well, a tremendous amount, because you could calculate the density of the atmosphere from its wings, and if you analyzed its blood properly, you would know the composition of the atmosphere, and you'd be able to calculate the gravitational pull of the Earth and its approximate mass, and...

By analyzing its DNA at a deep enough level, you could reconstruct a lot of the tree of life that characterizes Earth itself.

I mean, a bird is a densely packed microcosm of its environment.

And I thought, well, I don't know if you know this, Dr. Dawkins, but there was a medieval conceit among Christians hundreds of years ago that the human soul was a microcosm.

Right, which was a reflection of the cosmic order.

And your proposition as an evolutionary biologist is that you can't adapt to an environment that you're not a microcosmic replica of.

That's exactly the same claim that the Christians made, like in the medieval period.

We're a microcosm.

Our soul reflects the cosmic order.

You might say, well, what the hell does that mean, Dr. Peterson?

It means that if you're not in tune with the structure of reality at hand,

all of the levels at which it manifests itself, then you die.

That's what it means.

And so I found that extraordinarily interesting, especially because it has another implication, which is that if we are a microcosm of the cosmos itself and we're a personality, then maybe the deepest way that we can conceptualize our relationship to being and becoming itself is as a covenant, as a relationship, as an understanding between beings, right?

rather than as an alienated consciousness inhabiting a cold and dead material world.

And so...

I was interested in that partly because there's an insistence in the Old Testament stories that we're in relationship with being and becoming.

And, you know, and Tammy made reference to that in relationship, let's say, to prayer.