Jordan B. Peterson

Oh, you know, I'm going to do this.

Or, oh, you know, I feel I'm called to live this kind of life or...

But that's just one moment, right?

And the question of mediation of how, you know, the highest ends up in the lowest has to do with ritual.

It has to do with the rhythms of life we adopt in relation to, in order to orient ourselves in relation to those high things.

To bring in Aristotle,

who's been taking a bit of a hard time in this conversation.

Aristotle, in the Ethics, he brilliantly says how the virtues are established by repetition, right?

You become strong by lifting heavy things, right?

You become courageous by facing difficulty.

And if you want to live in relation to the highest,

You need every day to break that down into the, you might say the habits of holiness or the habits of orientation.

You can't spend your days as I have been tempted to do, distracted on the internet or scrolling this or being busy from one thing to the next and then think, what happened to the highest?

You've got to start very intentionally and build habits into your life

Or you'll always be at the situation of, you know, on again, off again.

Oh, there's a revelation.

One of the things you do with people in psychotherapy as a behaviorist is you find those things they're afraid of or disgusted by and are avoiding, and then you help them implement a practice of voluntary confrontation, voluntary incremental confrontation.

And the practice transforms them.

It makes them into someone who's no longer intimidated and retreating in the face of either disgust or paralyzed, in the face of disgust or of fear.

And it is that practice.