Maps of Meaning (2017 lecture videos)

Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief is a series of lectures based on the 1999 book by Canadian clinical psychologist and psychology professor Jordan Peterson. The theory describes how people construct meaning in a way that is compatible with the modern scientific understanding of how the brain functions. It examines the "structure of systems of belief and the role those systems play in the regulation of emotion", using "multiple academic fields to show that connecting myths and beliefs with science is essential to fully understand how people make meaning".

Peterson explores two main assumptions: 

(1) it is not clear either that the categories “given” to us by our senses, or those abstracted out for us by the processes of scientific investigation, constitute the most “real” or even the most “useful” modes of apprehending the fundamental nature of being or experience; and 

(2) it appears, instead, that the categories offered by traditional myths and religious systems might play that role, despite the initial unpalatability of such a suggestion. Such systems of apprehension present the world as a place of constant moral striving, conducted against a background of interplay between the “divine forces” of order and chaos.

His goals are to examine:

(1) why both individuals and groups participate in social conflict;
(2) the reasoning and motivation individuals take to support their belief systems (i.e. ideological identification) that eventually results in acts of violence such as killing and pathological atrocities like the Gulag, the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide; and 
(3) whether such an analysis of the world's religious ideas might allow us to describe our essential morality and eventually develop a universal system of morality.

Roughly speaking his theory is that we tell each other stories, to which we attach conscious meanings. But the stories have another unconscious meaning. Though we don’t always consciously grasp this meaning, we embody it in our various behavioral practices. When younger generations imitate our behaviors, they preserve this behaviorally-embodied meaning. Peterson’s "maps’ are supposed to chart this unconscious meaning, attached to various culturally-important stories and embodied in behavioral practices.

Will give you a rough guideline to find out for yourself what good goals might be for you. 

Maps of Meaning e01 - Context and Background
Maps of Meaning e02 - Marionettes & Individuals (Part 1)
Maps of Meaning e03 - Marionettes and Individuals (Part 2)
Maps of Meaning e04 - Marionettes and Individuals (Part 3)
Maps of Meaning e05 - Story and Metastory (Part 1)
Maps of Meaning e06 - Story and Metastory (Part 2)
Maps of Meaning e07 - Images of Story & Metastory
Maps of Meaning e08 - Neuropsychology of Symbolic Representation
Maps of Meaning e09 - Patterns of Symbolic Representation
Maps of Meaning e10 - Genesis and the Buddha
Maps of Meaning e11 - The Flood and the Tower
Maps of Meaning e12 - Final - The Divinity of the Individual