you should be a monster you know because everyone says well you should be harmless virtuous you shouldn't do anyone any harm you should sheath your competitive instinct you shouldn't try to win you know you you don't want to be too aggressive you don't want to be too assertive you want to take a back seat and all of that wrong you should be a monster an absolute monster and then you should learn how to control it if you put yourself in a new situation then new genes code for new proteins and build new neural structures and
new nervous system structures same thing happens to some degree when you work out right because your your muscles are responding to the load but your nervous system does that too so you imagine that there's a lot of potential you locked in your genetic code and then if you put yourself in a new situation then then the stress that's the situational stress that's produced by that particular situation unlocks those genes and then builds new parts of you so that's very cool because who knows how much there is locked inside of you the best men that i've
ever met are very dangerous men you don't mess with them a harmless man is not a good man a good man is a very very dangerous man who has that under voluntary control women don't even like harmless men they hate them they like to claw them apart [Applause] you know what what women want are dangerous men who are civilized and they want to help civilize them that's beauty and the beast you're harmless you're not virtuous you're just harmless you're like a rabbit rabbit isn't virtuous it's just just can't do anything except get eaten it's not
virtuous if you're a monster and you don't act monstrously then you're virtuous but you also have to be a monster well you see this all the time harry potter is like that too it's like he's he's flawed he's hurt he's got evil in him he can talk to snakes man he breaks rules all the time all the time he's not obedient at all but you know he has a good reason for breaking the rules and if if he couldn't break the rules him in his little clique of rule-breaking you know troublemakers if they didn't break
the rules they wouldn't attain the highest goal so it's very peculiar but it's it's very very it's a very very very very common mythological notion you know the hero has to be the hero has to be a monster but a controlled monster batman is like that you know i mean it's it's everywhere it's you know again in the harry potter stories you see he's touched by evil right he he actually has a soul fragment that's embedded within him that's as black as anything can possibly be that's why he could talk to snakes but without that
he wouldn't be able to have any victory and that's exactly right psychologically unless you can think the way that an evil person thinks then you're defenseless against them because they'll go places you can't imagine and then they win and so the best men i've met was interesting even when i was in junior high in high school because most of my friends dropped out you know by the time they're grade 10 thereabouts and a lot of them were guys who developed physically they're pretty powerful and they're just damn sick and putting up their hand to go
to the bathroom it's like you know they're not doing that anymore one of my friends got kicked out when he sort of challenged the gym teacher you know physically and the gym teacher he could do an iron cross he was a tough guy so it was no trivial matter for my friend to stand up to him but he got expelled anyways but you know i noticed that it wasn't it was often the kids whose character i admired that either quit or got expelled and they were the tougher guys who were just sick and tired of
following rules that didn't take into account their character and then they'd go off and work in the oil rigs or whatever you could do that in alberta at that time that was really hard work you know so it wasn't like they were necessarily taking the easy path but like a harmless man is not a good man a good man is a very very dangerous man who has that under voluntary control like one of the central female stories let's say if the hero archetype is the central male story there are variants of hero archetypes that are
relevant to women and one of them is beauty and the beast and you know beauty isn't interested in the guy who isn't the beast she's interested in the guy who's the beast and that's exactly right but she's interested in the guy who's the beast that can be civilized and disciplined there's no safe places and the next issue is do you really want a safe place is that what you want you want to be so weak that you want to be protected from threat what the hell kind of life is that you're a paralyzed rabbit in
a hole that's no life for a human being you should be confronting danger in the unknown and malevolent because and the reason for that too is this is the weird paradox this is and i believe this is the paradox first of all that was discovered in part by buddha but also laid forth very clearly in christianity which is that the solution to the problem of tragedy and malevolence is the willingness to face them now who the hell would ever guess that it's completely paradoxical it's a completely paradoxical suggestion is that well why does it work
well because the more you confront the two of them the more you grow and maybe you can grow so that you're actually larger than the chaos and malevolence itself and you think well what's the evidence for that and that's easy that's what people do that is how we learn like every time you expose your child to something new a playground what are they exposed to chaos and malevolence now there's more to it than that obviously because kids play and they you know they promote each other and they form friendships and all of that but in
the playground itself there is the complexity of the social structure and the malevolence of the bully it's right there and you throw your kid in there and you say adapt and they do okay so they can do it at a small scale it's not trivial the playground's a complicated place the kid can adapt well how much can you scale that up can you scale that up to from the chaos and order and malevolence of the playground to chaos and order and malevolence itself well that's the question well i don't think there's any reason to answer
that in the negative so because we don't know the full extent of a human being and it is the problem that's worked out so in the buddhist story for example what happens after so buddha's world collapses in the same way that adam and eve's world collapses it's a consequence of repetitive exposure to mortality and death what happens to buddha is he realizes that the little protected city that his father made for him the walled garden it's exactly the same motif that's in this adam and eve story it's fatally flawed that kind of protection cannot exist
and he he discovers that in pieces right which is exactly what happens to children is that they go out they discover a limit they run back and the parents can help them with the limit they run out they discover limit they run back but some at some point they run out they discover a limit they run back and the parents have nothing to say to them because they've hit the same limit that the parents hit which is like well what are you going to do with your life how are you going to how are you
going to operate in this archetypal universe well your parents can only say well they can say you identify with the proper archetypal figures they do that they at least act that out for you but at some point it's a problem that they cannot solve for you without making you weaker now you can tell i think one of the best there's two pathways to the development of the shadow and they're tightly aligned with one another the fundamental pathway is truth and that's to face the bitter truth about yourself but to break that down more particularly you
might think about that as the capacity to observe your own resentment you're going to be resentful and bitter in many situations because you don't get what you want and if you watch that resentment bitterness you'll see that it produces fantasies that can be unbelievably dark and that can be very frightening and you might not want to admit to yourself that you're actually capable of having fantasies like that or impulses of like that or aggressive feelings like that but the thing is is that if those aggressive feelings and impulses and fantasies are integrated into your character
it's like you're opening up a dialogue with a part of yourself that can be very forceful and strong and dangerous and it's really useful to be dangerous because if you can if you can be dangerous you often don't have to be and it's often weak people for example it's weak men generally speaking who rape you know that that's a very very common occurrence and that's a violent act but it's born out of weakness not out of strength that's for sure and so anyways you attend to your resentment honestly and you observe yourself and what you're
actually like you got to pay attention as if you don't know yourself as if you might harbor hidden devils
