Hey, everyone, here we go.

So I I saw somebody ask right off about if there were any women.

I think they said girls, actually, if there any women in the audience, Um and if there are, well, that's good.

So welcome.

Um, thanks to all you patri on people for your continued support, it's a really big deal.

It's made a huge difference.

And you're a big part of the reason that biblical lecture was so ridiculously successful.

I think more than two million people have watched it so far, so that's success by any stretch of the imagination.

So let's start with some questions here.

I've got to live chat going, and, um, we also set it up so that, uh, we had we had questions taken to begin with that people could up fault, which seems to be a good idea.

Let's start with one from Practice Cube.

What would be a practical approach for developing your shadow?

Well, that's a good one.

Let's let's do a little review of union psychology.

The first thing is, if you want to know about this, the proper sources.

Carl Young's collected Works Volume nine, Volume nine, and there's two parts to Volume 9 a.m. be published as separate texts, and Volume nine is called Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, and the other one is called I Own.

But in archetypes the collective unconscious, there's a good discussion of the persona and the shadow.

The persona, you could say, is a good way of thinking about it.

You know, you watch all those wrong coms where there's always kind of a beta male guy who's being real friendly and always failing miserably with women because basically, he's lying to himself.

And to them, um, he's a persona, and a persona is the face that you show to the world when you're trying to pretend and to convince yourself and others that you're, I would say harmless.

But we could say a good person.

But a good person isn't harmless.

A good person is capable of.

Well, maybe a good person is capable of anything but is willing to hold that in the bands.

I read this interesting commentary a little while ago on a statement by Christ in the New Testament, and the statement generally interpreted is that the meek shall inherit the Earth.

But I was looking up.

The multiple translations of the word meek and meek is actually derived from a Greek word, of course, because the Bible, at least some of the original forms of the Bible were in Greek.

Um, and that word didn't exactly mean Mieke.

It meant something like, um, those who have weapons and the ability to use them.

But certain but determined to keep them sheathed will inherit the world.

And that means that people who are capable of force, let's say, but decided not to use it, are in the proper moral position and needs.

You commented on that a fair bit, too, you know, he he thought of most moral morality as cowardice, not because morality itself was cowardice, but because most people who are cowards disguised their coward cowardice as morality.

And they claim that they're harmless nous, which is actually a consequence of their fear and inability to be harmful, say, or to be dangerous is actually a sign of their moral integrity.

And that's a really bad idea.

So, you know, if you're an ax murder, but you don't have an axe, that doesn't mean that your moral so now, with regards to so that's the persona and the persona is the mask that you wear.

And that's what persona means is the mask that you wear to convince yourself in the world that you're not a terrible monster, so that when you look at yourself in the mirror, you don't have to run away screaming.

You know when you might think, Well, that's a bit of an overstatement, but you was very interested in phenomena such as, um, say psychological, the psychological phenomena that would characterize the actions of someone who might be in our sweats camp guard, for example.

And, uh, you know, that's pretty monstrous form of behavior.

And the thing about our Schwitz camp guards is that there's no reason to assume, really, that they were much different than normal people Now.

There would have been exceptions, obviously, but and what that means is that perhaps you two could be in Auschwitz camp guard, and perhaps you would even derive some enjoyment out of it, and you might think not.

But you shouldn't think not so quickly.

And what that also implies is that if you could see what that meant when you looked in the mirror and looked at yourself you might run away screaming because you'd have a revelation of just exactly what the human being is capable of.

And that's a very unpleasant revelation and also one of the things that stops people from being enlightened, because that revelation of the evil of the self is part of the journey to enlightenment and an early part.

Now the shadow would be all the parts of the personality that the persona rejects, and that might be the aggressive elements.

Certainly the that's the case with for people who are hyper agreeable.

And now you can tell, I think one of the best.

There's two pathways to the development of the shadow, and they're tightly allied 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 could be very forceful and strong and dangerous.

And it's really useful to be dangerous, because if you can, if you convey dangerous, you often don't have to be, and it's 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 gotta pay attention, as if you don't know yourself as if you might harbor hidden devils, and then maybe they'll emerge now.

Young also felt that sort of embedded inside the shout.

It were the Contra sexual tendencies.

And so, for example, sometimes you see people who are well developed men, let's say and we can We can also talk about women in this regard.

Men who have integrated their shadow often also developed a kind of peculiar grace that would be a consequence of not only allowing they're aggressive side to step forward, but also their their feminine, compassionate side that might, that they may have kept squelched because of embarrassment about it or because they've been harassed for being weak or any number of things.

So.

But the practical approach for developing your shadow, I would say, is to contemplate and consider your resentment and notice what it says.

And because your resentment will also tell you what you have to say, you know?

So, look, look what happened Google this weekend.

You know, James Damore wrote that memo, and you can imagine he was pretty angry and perhaps even somewhat resentful at having to attend that diversity seminar, and I'm really just using this as an example.

But what he did was decide that that meant that he had something that he had to say and then look at the consequences of that man.

It's absolutely unbelievable.

And so you know, if you're feeling oppressed at worker, you're oppressed in your life or you know where you're oppressing yourself, then you got to notice that you're feeling oppressed.

Then you have to notice that you're feeling resentful, resentful and and angry and bitter and maybe even like cane in the story of Cain and Abel, because cane is sort of the archetypal bitter man, and then you have to decide what it is that you need to do in order to remove from yourself that bitterness, and that's usually means that there's something that you have to say, and then you have to say it because your soul depends on it.

And not only does your soul depend on it, I would say the fate of the world depends on it because you know you might be wrong, and then you should be straightened out.

Maybe you're just being whiny, and you have to talk to somebody about that.

But it may be that you're actually detecting something wrong, some tyranny that's directed towards you and other people, and it's like your moral obligation to speak up about it.

And so many workplace has become toxic to use.

A terrible question cliche because of the people in them won't speak up for what they actually want or they speak up too late, and then they're all twisted up about it and and, you know, they're torturing other people because they're so unhappy and so forth and so on.

So practical approach for developing in shadow fundamentally is radical honesty.

And Young said that, you know a genuine moral effort was a good substitute for psychotherapy.

What is my opinion on open relationships?

Polyamory, other forms of non monogamy?

Well, I think that as a medium to long term strategy, they're completely untenable because human beings, as far as I'm concerned, are fundamentally pair bonding.

And, you know, if you're just talking about casual sex, first of all, I think casual sex is a contradiction in terms.

I don't think there's anything about sex that's casual, and I think that people are deceiving themselves badly whenever they think so.

They might like to live in a 19 seventies Playboy adolescent fantasy, but I don't I've never seen that work under any circumstances whatsoever, and I think people get hurt badly.

It's also a bad medium to long term strategy because no pair bonding is a is the most stable arrangement we know of at least so far.

Well, I won't even put it that way.

It's the only stable mode of being that we know for the long run, and that's especially the case when you bring Children into the equation.

So I think it's delusional, fundamentally, and I think that people who are who believe that such things work.

I mean, sometimes they're open people in their creative in their exploratory and all of that, and fair enough.

But often they're just unconscious, anxious, and they don't want to take any responsibility.

And they want to live in this wish fulfillment fantasy where everybody can have all the sex they want all the time.

And it's always wonderful and no one gets hurt.

And it's like Sorry, that just doesn't work in the real world.

So my girlfriend is quite overweight, but I really love her.

Should I try to encourage her lose weight?

Aside from personal preference, is this likely to explode into a major issue down the road?

Who?

I don't think that you can fool yourself about what you're attracted to?

And yes, it's certainly likely to develop into a major issue down the road.

Um, it's tough, you know, uh, because it's so The devil's in the details, you know?

Should you try to encourage her lose weight?

I guess the question is, how would you do that without disrupting the relationship and and without knowing more about the details of that, I would say that I don't know how to tell what to tell you to do about that.

I think that it's necessary to be truthful in a relationship period.

But I also think that you can't use the truth to hurt.

You know, the truth is a very complicated thing, and it's it's a sword and it cuts and you can't use it to hurt.

Now, you know, maybe you would be subtle enough to figure out some way that you could both embark on a health promoting endeavor together, and that would work out.

But I would say, you know, if you if you're in a stable, long term relationship with someone, it's pretty much necessary for both of you to address all the issues that are making you unhappy with each other.

Um, you know, assuming there's some give and take on that, because otherwise the relationship can easily come apart at the seams like I would say, My wife and I are both very hard on each other about our physical appearance, Let's say, and I've gained a fair bit of weight from the time I was, say, 40 till the time I was 50 about probably because I was eating things that weren't good for me.

And I would say that was primarily carbohydrates.

I can tell you if you want to lose weight, you start eating carbohydrates, man, you'll lose weight like you wouldn't believe.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend it because it has some dangerous, but it certainly works.

But you know, the the alternative to protect to the alternative is to pretend that everything's all right.

And all that means is that you're likely to get drunk sometimes and someday and have an affair out of bitterness and spite in the fact that you're no longer attracted to your partner.

So it's pretty rough, so that's pretty rough way of thinking about things.

But life's pretty rough.

So what is the story behind the logo that you use in your intros?

Where did it come from?

That's that logo is called the meaning of music, and it's actually a sculpture that I made in 1985.

That's about 5.5 feet by have 5.5 feet and about eight inches thick.

And it's made out of foam core, which is this.

But it's a sub.

It's, Ah, material that's often used as a backing for paintings or for when you get them framed.

It's it's Styrofoam sheet about 1/4 of an inch thick, with paper on both sides, and you can cut it very accurately with an Exacto knife.

And so what I did was make a stack of those of those foam core sheets about eight inches high, and I made the thing in quarters and so that it would fit together on the wall because it would have been too big to maneuver easily.

And it's a very complicated image.

It's actually a three dimensional representation of A.

It's a three dimensional representation of a two dimensional representation of a four dimensional object and that four dimensional object you could think of as it's a representation of time and space.

And I can tell you I kind of have to hint at what the painting means.

It or the sculpture.

It means the same thing that music means.

You know how music unfolds, and then something else unfolds within it.

And then it unfolds again within it, like a rose opening into the into the day.

Or like a lotus flower that sort of comes up from the darkest depths up through the dark water and then blooms on the on the surface of the water and the sun.

And that's where the Buddha, you know, What would you say?

Simple.

Symbolically rest.

So imagine that thing opening and then imagine that that's what that painting is an image of, and that's the same thing as music.

So it's a Mandela image.

And for Young that Mandela was a symbol of the self and the self was something that unfolds like music, which is actually why we like music.

And it's like the the Rose, the rose that you see the geometric rows that you see in stained glass.

It's the same thing.

That's the stained glass window that Pinocchios reprehensible compatriot What's his name?