STOP BEING WEAK AND BECOME A MONSTER I Jordan Peterson's Life Advice Will Leave You Speechless

you most want to find will be found where you least want to look there's this old story that's from King Arthur and King Arthur has these Knights right they all sit around a round table which means they're roughly equal that's what the round table means and they're off to find the holy grail and the Holy Grail is the most valuable object that's what it means so they're off to find the most valuable thing but they don't know what it is and they don't know where it is but they know that there's a most valuable thing

so in some sense it's akin to them orienting themselves by the star and they don't know where to look and so what they decide is they have the castle it's the middle of a forest and so each Knight decides to start looking for the Holy Grail by entering the forest at the point that looks darkest to him and so what's the idea there well imagine there are things that come easy to you and that you're fond of pursuing and that you're happy about pursuing so you've found those and pursued them and you've mastered them so

you know all that but then there's another place that you don't want to go and so you haven't gone there and you haven't mastered it and you're very small in comparison to it because you haven't mastered it and so it has this monstrous aspect if what you're doing isn't working it's where you haven't gone that you need to go and so I can give you another example of this so let's say you're an agreeable person and so you don't like conf and you won't stand up for yourself and you regard anger and the proclivity to

provoke and to engage in Conflict as something that's positively terrible it's not only that you're not good at it it's actually that it's wrong so that's where you have to go if you're going to learn how to stand up for yourself and imagine that you're afraid maybe you have something like agrop phobia so there's a whole bunch of things that you're afraid of and you don't want to go there but if you want to put yourself together then that's exactly where you have to go and so it's frequently the case that what you want to

find is to be found where you least want to find it and that idea is echoed in The prominent stories of dragons and gold it's exactly the same idea the dragon is this terrible thing it's this terrible predatory thing that lives forever and is very very wise and it lives underground and it'll kill you it'll burn you up in a second but it Hoards gold and so you have to go there into the Dragon's Lair if you're going to get the gold and that's a representation of people's paradoxical relationship with reality it's like you have

to go out there and confront it in order to incorporate what it has to offer to you but the probability that that's going to be intensely dangerous and push you right to the Limit first of all those are actually the same thing if it didn't push you to the Limit you wouldn't gain anything valuable from it so you don't get one without the other you don't get the gold without the dragon that's a very strange very very strange idea but it seems to be accurate so all of that's lurking underneath this in this imagery of

the whale now the whale you can think of the story of Jonah what happens with Jonah is that roughly speaking he's a prophet and God tells him that he has to go to this city and straighten it out because it's veered off the path and it's heading towards doom and Jonah thinks I'm not go into that City to tell those people anything like that because they're not going to be very happy with me just showing up there and telling them you know everything they're doing wrong and so he hops on a boat and tries to

get out of there and then God conjures up this huge storm and the boat is about to be swamped and Jonah admits that it's actually his fault because God's upset with him because he got this direct command to go straighten out the city and he ran off and so they're not happy about this but they throw Jonah overboard and the Seas Cal and great fish comes up a whale and swallows him and then he's down in the fish for 3 days and it throws him up on the dry land and then he's learned his lesson

by that time and he goes off to pursue his proper Destiny so that's echoed in this story as well that if you don't follow the pathway that you're supposed to follow the Seas will become stormy for you and something will come up and pull you down and you'll be in a terrible place for some length of time till you learn your lesson and if you're lucky you'll get spit back up on shore and then you can go do what you should do well I mean that's not a lesson that anybody needs to have interpreted I

think everybody understands that anyways the cricket tells Pinocchio what he has to do and then something kind of paradoxical happens Pinocchio decides he's going to go do this and then the cricet has got this weird paradoxical response to that on the one hand he's he's sort of pulling Pinocchio back saying look you know this is fool hearty that you going to go all the way down to the ocean you're going to confront this terrible whale this is really really dangerous but at the same time when Pinocchio is on the edge of the cliff the cricket

helps him tie his tail around a rock and he he holds his finger in place so that Pinocchio can tie the knot it's like the conscience is conflicted about this it's really dangerous and fool hearty but it's also necessary and so he plays this dual role but Pinocchio is leading at this point so into the ocean he goes I guess partly what this means is that if you're not oriented properly in the world you should take your doubts and the chaos that you're enveloped in seriously you should face it and think it through you should

go into it as far as you can go into it because maybe you'll find something at the bottom of it I mean the alternative is to pretend that it doesn't exist part of Spiritual Development is to recognize the satanic tendencies that characterize you and to fully wrestle with them and to and to integrate them that's the thing it's it's not so much to cast them away it's to transmute them you know and you can see the difference between people who've done that and people who haven't at least to some degree because people who haven't integrated

the shadow at all are naive and you can tell that when you look at them and you can tell that when you talk to them and because they're naive they're often resentful as well because they get taken advantage of and someone who's integrated that more they're dangerous in in the martial arts sort of way which is they're dangerous but they don't have to be they don't have to use it because their presence radiates implicit potential for havoc and that's really necessary it's one of the things that gives people self-respect if you're harmless you're not virtuous

you're just harmless you're like a rabbit a rabbit isn't virtuous he 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's like that too he'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 he couldn't break the rules him and his little click 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 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 it's the story you always hear if you're going to be a fighter you have to want to win and you have to want to hurt

people I mean not for the sake of hurting them that's what makes you different than an evil person but you have to have that capacity you have to develop that and you know that's the step on the way to Enlightenment weirdly enough because that isn't what people think people have been fed this diet of paum Rights and impulsive freedom for so long there's just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story there are no rights technically speaking without responsibilities and all we've had for 60 years is a dialogue about rights well that leaves

a hole on the other side of the story and it's a hole that that's in people's hearts essent because responsibility well perhaps that's not more important than rights like I said they're they're part and parcel of the same formula but it's in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life it's not in happiness it's not in impulsive pleasure those things blow away at the first ill wind but to adopt the responsibility for your own well-being and to try to put your family together and to try to serve your community and to

try to seek for Eternal truth and to live them that's the sort of thing that can ground you in in your life enough so that you can withstand the difficulty of life and when you tell people that especially when you include yourself in the audience let's say and you're not finger waving from above then everyone knows that it's true there's been this attempt to identify masculine competence and and power let's say but mostly competence with tyranny and that's very very hard on on young men it's also hard on young women for that matter but it's

very helpful for people to hear that they should make themselves competent and dangerous and take their proper place in the world because it's the alternative to being weak and weak is not good the people who shoot up the high schools they're weak they're weak and life is a very difficult process and you're not prepared for it unless unless you have the capacity to be dangerous that doesn't mean that you should be cruel it doesn't mean any of that there's a statement in the New Testament the meek shall inherit the Earth but the meek isn't well

translated if means something more like those who have swords and know how to use them but keep them sheathed will inherit the world that's a way better way of thinking about it you have to be powerful and formidable and then peaceful in that order right and that's not the same as being naive and weak and harmless which is what young men are being encouraged to be it's like that's a very bad idea it's a very bad idea because naive weak and harmless means that you can't withstand the tragedies of life you can't bear any responsibility

you'll end up bitter and when you get bitter then you get dangerous you don't treat adult men as if they're infants but the young man really need to hear this more I think is that you should be a monster you know cuz 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 it's like no

wrong you should be a monster an ABS abolute monster and then you should learn how to control it someone who is incapable of Cruelty is a higher moral being than someone who is capable of Cruelty and I would say and this follows Yung as well that that's incorrect and it's dangerously incorrect because if you are not capable of Cruelty you are absolutely a victim to anyone who is and so part of the reason that people go watch anti-heroes and villains is because there's a part of them crying out for the incorporation of the monster within

them which is what gives them strength of character and self-respect because it's impossible to respect yourself until you grow teeth and if you grow teeth then you realize that you're somewhat dangerous or maybe somewhat seriously dangerous and then you might be more willing to demand that you treat yourself with respect and other people do the same thing and so that doesn't mean that being cruel is better than not being cruel what it means is that being able to be cruel and then not being cruel is better than not being able to be cruel because in

the first case you're nothing but weak and naive and in the second case you're dangerous but you have it under control and you know a lot of martial arts concentrate on exactly that as part of their philosophy of training it's like we're not training you to fight we're training you to be peaceful and awake and avoid fights but if you happen to have to get in one and I guess the philosophy also is is that if you're competent at fighting that actually decreases the probability that you're going to have to fight because when someone pushes

you you'll be able to respond with confidence and with any luck and this is certainly the case with bullies with any luck a reasonable show of confidence which is very much equivalent to a show of dominance is going to be enough to make the bully back off and so the strength that you develop in your monstrousness is actually the best guarantee of peace and that's partly why Yung believed that it was necessary for people to integrate their Shadow and he said that was a terrible thing for people to attempt because the human Shadow which is

all those things about yourself that you don't want to realize reaches all the way to hell and what he meant by that was it's through an analysis of your own shadow that you can come to understand why other people are capable and you as well of the sorts of terrible atrocities that characterized let's say the 20th century and without that understanding there's no possibility of bringing it under control when you study Nazi Germany for example or you study the Soviet Union particularly under stellin and you're asking yourself well what are these perpetrators like forget about

the victims let's talk about the perpetrators the answer is they're just like you and if you don't know that that just means that you don't know anything about people including yourself and then it also means that you have to discover why they're just like you and believe me that's no picnic so that's enough to traumatize people and that's partly why they don't do it and it's also partly why the path to Enlightenment and wisdom is seldom trod upon because if it was all a matter of following your bliss and doing what made you happy then

everyone in the world would be a paragon of wisdom but it's not that at all it's the it's a matter of facing the thing you least want to face this is an interesting thing about the integration of the Shadow because recognizing yourself as the Locust of evil let's say actually in some sense gives you far more respect for yourself strangely enough because the same respect that you might have for a wild animal or even a monster so then maybe you learn to treat yourself differently like I I think this is particularly true with regards to

the discipline of children you know if you know that you're a monster and that that will manifest itself in your life consciously or unconsciously and if it's unconsciously it's it's not good then you become better at disciplining children and the reason for that is that you don't want to expose them to your dark side and so if they behave and don't provoke you which means they'll also behave for other people then the Monstrous part can stay in abeyance and then that great but if you don't understand yourself as capable of wreaking havoc and that can

be the kind of Havoc that unfolds over decades right because if you're going to abuse a child it's the Primitive form of abuse is the physical abuse the sophisticated form of abuse is the continual undermining of the child's courage across perhaps their entire life and that's there's a terribly monstrous element to that and if you're not respected properly by the child say you will absolutely take revenge on them and you know in some sense that's the whole Freudian psychoanalytic story it's it's not all of it but you either have that or it has you those

are the options and you don't become safe by being castrated I started to pay very careful attention to what I was saying I don't know if that happened voluntarily or involuntarily but I could feel a sort of split developing in my psyche and and I've actually had students tell me this same thing has happened to them after they've listened to some of the material that that I've been describing to all of you but it split into two let's say and one part was the let's say the old me that was talking a lot and that

liked to argue and that liked ideas and there was another part that was watching that part like just with its eyes open and neutrally judging and the part that was neutrally judging was watching the part that was talking and going that isn't your idea you don't really believe that you don't really know what you're talking about that isn't true and I thought hm that's really interesting and that was happening to like 95% of what I was saying and so then I didn't really know what to do I thought okay this is strange so maybe I

fragmented and that's just not a good thing at all I mean it wasn't like I was hearing voices or anything like that I mean it wasn't like that well people have multiple parts so then I had a this weird conundrum it was like well which of these two things are me is it the part that's listening and saying no that's rubbish that's a lie that's you're doing that to impress people you're just trying to win the argument you know was that me or was the part that was going about my normal verbal business me and

I didn't know but I decided I would go with the critic and then what I tried to do what I learned to do I think was to stop saying things that made me weak I mean I'm still trying to do that because I'm always feeling when I talk whether or not the words that I'm saying are either making me align or making me come apart and I think the alignment I really do think the alignment is the right way of conceptualizing it because I think if you say things that are as true as you can

say them let's say then they come up they come out of the depths inside of you you because well we don't know where thoughts come from we don't know how far down into your substructure the thoughts emerge we don't know what processes of physiological alignment are necessary for you to speak from the core of your being we don't understand any of that we don't even conceptualize that but I believe that you can feel that and I learned some of that from Reading Carl Rogers by the way who's a great clinician U because he talked about

mental health in part as a coherence between the the spiritual or the or the abstract and the physical that the two things were aligned and there's a lot of idea of alignment in in psychoanalytic and clinical thinking but anyways I decided that I would start practicing not saying things that would make me weak and what happened was that I had to stop saying almost everything that I was saying I would say 95% of it it's a hell of a shock to wake up and I mean this was over a few months but it's a hell

of a shock to wake up and realize that you're mostly dead wood it's a shock you know and you might think well do you really want all of that to burn off it's like well there's nothing left but a little husk 5% of you it's like well if that 5% is solid then maybe that's exactly what you want to have happen it's a question worth asking just exactly what are your motives well you know maybe they're purer than mine were and it's certainly possible I don't think that I'm naturally a particularly good person I think

I have to work at it very very hard and I don't necessarily think that everyone is like that but some people are worse than that and everyone's like that to some degree so it's worth thinking about just how much trouble are you trying to cause you know and the other thing you might think about is that if you're not doing something important with your life by your own definition because that's the game that we're playing you get to define the terms at least initially maybe you're prone to cause trouble just because you don't have anything

better to do trouble is more interesting than boring you know that's something you learn if you read doeski doeski knew that extraordinarily well and so if you're not doing something if you're not pushing yourself to the limits of Your Capacity then you have plenty of leftover willpower energy and resources to devote to causing interesting trouble and so and it's not self-destructive because what it is is an attempt to it's like the diagnosis of an illness it's like if that does happen to be the case for you or to some degree maybe it's only 10% of

you or something or maybe it's 90% well then coming to terms with that is excellent because then maybe you can stop doing it and what would be the downside to that you'd have to give up your resentment obviously and your hatred and all of that and that's really annoying because those emotions are very they're easy to engage in and they're and they're engaging and they have this feeling of self-righteousness with them and that goes along with them but you're not doing this in order to put yourself down you're doing this in order to separate the

wheat from the chaff and to leave everything that you don't have to be behind I've dealt with lots of people who have anxiety disorders you know and one thing about people who have anxiety disorders is they are not mysterious to me it's no problem for me to understand why people have anxiety disorders or why they're depressed or why they have substance use problems the mystery to me is always why people don't have all of those things at once because everybody has a reason to be anxious in fact we have the ultimate reason to be anxious

because we know that we're vulnerable and we know that we're going to die and how you cannot be anxious under those circumstances is a great mystery it's a massive mystery and the same thing applies with regards to depression and then the same thing applies to some degree with regards to drug and alcohol abuse as I said last week There's plenty of reasons to drown your Consciousness in alcohol that's for sure we could refer to the aforementioned anxiety and depression not least and the sorts of drugs that people are prone to take are chemicals that take

the the affective edge off the tragedy of life so back to the issue of fear Abraham is self-conscious that's what this commentary says but the thing is is he moves forward despite that he's self-conscious and he knows the danger but he moves forward despite that and that's actually the appropriate response in the face of actual non-naive understanding of what constitutes life like if you're naive and you move forward it's like well what the hell do you know you know there's no courage and naivity because you don't know what there is to stop you you don't

know what dangers you might apprehend but to be aware of what it is that your problem is so to be alert existentially let's say or to be fully self-conscious means that you're perfectly aware of your limitations and how you might be hurt and then to make the decision to move forward into the unknown and the land of the stranger anyways that's the I would say that's one of the secrets to a good life and I I can say that really without fear of contradiction I would say because the clinical literature on this is very very

very clear what you do with people who are afraid and and to some degree depressed but certainly anxious is you lay out what they're anxious about first of all in detail what is it that you're afraid of what might happen and then you decompose it into small problems hypothetically manageable problems and then you have the person expose themselves to the thing that they're afraid of and what happens isn't that they get less afraid that isn't what the clinical literature indicates exactly what happens instead is they get braver and that's not the same thing right because

if you get less afraid it's like well the world isn't as dangerous as I thought it was you know Silly me if you get braver that's not what happens what happens is yeah the damn world is just as dangerous as I thought or maybe it's even more dangerous than I thought but it turns out that there's something in me that responds to taking that on as a voluntary Challenge and grows and thrives as a consequence and there's no doubt about this even the psychophysiological findings are quite clear if you impose a stressor on two groups

of people and on one group The stressor is imposed involuntarily and on the other group The stressor is picked up voluntarily the people who pick up the stressor voluntarily use a whole different psychophysiological system to deal with it they use the system that's associated with approach and Challenge and not the system that's associated with defensive aggression and withdrawal and the system that is associated with challenge is much more associated with positive emotion and much less associated with negative emotion it's also much less hard on you because the defensive posturing system the prey animal system man

when that thing kicks in it's all systems are go for you you know the pedals push down to the metal and the brakes are on you're using future resources that you could be storing for future time right now in the present to ready yourself for emergency so there's nothing simple or trivial at all about the idea of being called to move forthrightly forward into the strange and the unknown and there's a real Adventure that's associated with that right so that's an exciting thing which is part of the reason why people travel and then and also

to see yourself as the sort of creature that can do that is willing to do that on a habitual basis is also the right kind of tonic for I hate this word for your self-esteem you know because the self-esteem has nothing to do with feeling good about yourself as I already mentioned there isn't necessarily a reason why a priority you should just feel good about yourself but if you can view yourself acting in a courageous and forthright Manner and encountering the world and trying to improve your lot and taking risks you know in a non-naive

way well then you have something that you can Comfort yourself with at night when you're wondering what the whole damn point is of your futile and miserable life and that's necessary because it's often the case that you wake up at 4 in the morning or at least sometimes the case that you wake up at 400 in the morning when things haven't been going that well and wonder just what the hell the point is of your futile and miserable life you have to have something real to set against that it can't be just rationalizations about how

you know you're a valuable person among others even though that's true that's not good enough you need something that's more realistic to set against that and observing courage in yourself is definitely one of the things that can help you sleep soundly at night when things are destabilized a little bit around you the Greeks had the maximum know thyself how do we come to know ourselves in terms of our personalities and more importantly potential well one of the first ways to come to know yourself is to understand that you don't you know you can learn to

kind of watch yourself like you're watching a stranger you have to adopt a position is a position of radical humility I would say humility in two senses so one sense would be the humility of recognizing your ignorance so you have to understand that you don't know who you are that's not easy to understand cuz you think you know but then you know you remember you can't control yourself very well you're not very disciplined you're full of flaws maybe you don't know yourself as well as you think but it's hard to get low enough to understand

how deeply it is the that you are ignorant about who you are now there's an upside to that too which also is that you're also ignorant about who you could be and so the discovery of that you know is some reward for the horror of determining who you actually are then I would say well then you watch yourself you watch yourself like you're watching a stranger you watch what you say and you listen you think well what sort of person would say that and how am I reacting emotionally when I'm communicating in that manner is

that making me feel stronger weaker is it is it is it filling me with shame is it helping my confidence um am I laying out a lie am I deceiving myself and other people am I adopting this personality at parties that is designed to impress and to amuse and it comes across as nothing but self-centered narcissism um what are my dark fantasies what are my aggressive fantasies um what is it that I'm willing to do what am I interested in so that I'll spontaneously pursue it what do I procrastinate about and why what am I

unwilling to do what do I think is good what do I congratulate myself for accomplishing and what do I berate myself for failing to confront and to implement those are all incredibly complicated questions and you don't know the answers to them so that's that's a start and then in terms of potential well you'll discover a little bit more about your potential as you discover who you are especially the darker parts of yourself because then you discover your potential for Mayhem there's some real utility in that it's actually something that strengthens you because the first thing

that a realization like that can in fact produce is the ambition to incorporate that dangerousness into a higher order personality and that can make you implacable that can make you someone who can say no when you need to say no you know that can make you someone who won't avoid necessary conflict and so that's unbelievably useful and so that's one of the potentials that you might discover the other thing you do to discover your potential is to well you challenge yourself you know it's like rule four in my book 12 rules for life is compare

yourself to who you were yesterday and not who someone else is today and that's kind of a good way to start this it's like well take a bit of a look at yourself and think about what's not so good that you could improve that you should improve by your own standards and that you would improve you know and set yourself a little goal you know maybe you're not studying at all and you're at University or maybe you're at work and you've got this stack of paper there you know and you haven't looked at that damn

stack for like a month and you know that you should be and you're bothering yourself at night because you're avoiding that think well I've avoided that stack of paper completely for one month I'm quite a coward when it comes to whatever snakes might be hidden in that stack of paper how about tomorrow I just like put that stack of paper in front of me on my desk and I I glance through it for 15 seconds see if I can do that it's like well you set yourself a goal of improvement you know it's a humble

goal because really are you such a coward that the best that you can bloody well manage after a month of avoidance is 15 seconds of exposure to a stack of paper you know it could easily be you've been avoiding it you're obviously afraid of it and so the situation could be that dismal and dire and you might think well jeez it's no bomb to my ego it's no it's not fostering the strength of my ego to recognize myself someone who could only withstand 15 seconds of exposure to that thing I'm afraid of and so that's

a form of humility too it's like there's things you could do to improve and you know what they are and there's small steps that you could take that you might take that would put you in that direction and then the question is are you big enough to take those small steps you know are you capable of grappling with the fact that you're fundamentally flawed to the point where you have to break things down into almost childlike steps in order to manage them and the answer to that is yeah you are and that's the lot of

I don't know if it's the lot of everyone most people have things they avoid you know and they're afraid of so I would say to some degree it's the lot of everyone people vary in the degree to which they've conquered that and you do meet people from time to time who are extraordinarily disciplined but most of the time they've got disciplined in exactly this manner it's through slow incremental Improvement and then you challenge yourself it's like well could I do this that would be better then you find out and then you think well is there

something slightly larger and more challenging that I could do that would be better and and you try it and you find out and as you try it and you find out generally you get better at it and you can take on larger and larger challenges you know you take responsibility for yourself that's part of standing up straight with your shoulders back it's like Take On The World man but only in the only at the level that you can manage you know when you're ignorant and biased and deeply flawed and immature it's where everyone starts you

don't want to bite off more than you can chew but it doesn't mean that you can't wrestle with with part of reality you know some part that's small enough so that you have a good shot at Victory and to put yourself together the first steps towards that is to allow yourself to be a fool right it's because you don't know what you're doing you have to admit that and there's going to be a loss of ego or destruction of ego arrogant ego that necessarily accompanies that but you need the loss of that arrogant ego because

it's precisely what's interfering with your movement forward you know it's part of the adversarial process mythologically speaking that stops moral progress you're too proud of who you think you are to notice what you're like so that you could change properly you don't want to sacrifice that part of yourself it's probably associated with some delusion that helps you maintain a positive although very fragile self-image you know in the absence of genuine effort it's not to be recommended you know yourself by watching and paying attention it's watching like you're a snake a snake watches like cold-bloodedly with

no emotional reaction just to see what's there doesn't allow symbolically speaking doesn't allow what is wanted or desired to interfere with what is observed so you watch yourself like that as if you don't know who you are well that's the beginning and then you challenge yourself continually to see how far past yesterday you can push today and tomorrow and to continually experiment with expanding the domains not only of your competence but of your ability to increase that competence and the upper limit to that is proportional to the moral effort that you put into it the

more that's Guided by the highest of all possible Visions right the alliance with the highest of all possible conceivable good and the more it's accompanied by truth in speech and action the more you will develop your potential and you also I suppose have to be willing to undertake that as an adventure because it's a hell of a thing to bear that kind of responsibility it takes a person out of the ordinary it takes them out of themselves and there's an alienation and an isolation that goes along with that and a great sorrow all of that

together but there's deep meaning to be had in it and it's and there isn't anything better that you can do so that's the answer to that question this is the Peter Pan story roughly speaking is Peter Pan is this magical boy pan means pan is the god of everything roughly speaking right and so it's not an accident that he has the name pan and he's the boy that won't grow up and he's magical well that's because children are magical they can be anything they're nothing but potential and Peter Pan doesn't want to give that up

why well he's got some adults around him but the main adult is Captain Hook well who the hell wants to grow up to be Captain Hook first of all you've got a hook second you're a tyrant and third you're chased by the dragon of chaos with a clock in its stomach right the crocodile it's already got a piece of you well that's what happens when you get older time has already got a piece of you and eventually it's got a taste for you and eventually it's going to eat you and so Hook is so traumatized

by that that he can't help but be a tyrant and then Peter Pan looks at traumatized hook and says well no I'm not sacrificing my childhood for that so that's fine except he ends up King Of The Lost Boys in Neverland well Neverland doesn't exist and who the hell wants to be king of the Lost Boys And he also sacrifices the possibility that have a real relationship with a woman cuz that's Wendy right and she's kind of conservative middle class London dwelling girl she wants to grow up and have kids and have a life she

accepts her mortality she accepts her maturity Peter Pan has to content himself with Tinker Bell she doesn't even exist she's like she's like the fairy of porn she doesn't exist she's the substitute for the real thing but the dichotomy that you're talking about is very tricky because there's a sacrificial element in maturation right you have to sacrifice the plur potentiality of child Ood for the actuality of a frame and the question is well why would you do that well one reason is it happens to you whether you do it or not you can either choose

your damn limitation or you can let it take you unaware when you're 30 or even worse when you're 40 and then that is not a happy day you see I see people like this and I think it's more and more common in our culture because people can put off M maturity without suffering an immediate penalty but that happens is the penalty acrs and then when it finally hits it just WPS you because when you're 25 you can be an idiot it's no problem even when you're out in a job search it's like well you don't

have any experience and you're kind of Clueless it's yeah yeah you're young you know it's no problem we can that's what young people are like but they're full of potential okay well now you're the same person at 30 it's like people aren't so thrilled about you at that point it's like what the hell have you been doing for the last 10 years well I'm just as clueless as I was when I was 22 yeah but you're not not 22 you're an old infant right and that's an ugly thing an old infant so part of the

reason you choose your damn sacrifice because the sacrifice is inevitable but at least you get to choose it and then there's something that's that's even more complex than that in some sense is that the problem with being a child is that all you are is potential and it's really low resolution you could be anything but you're not anything so then you go and you adopt an apprenticeship roughly speaking and then you become at least you become something and when you're something that makes the world open up to you again you know like if you're a

really good plumber then you end up being far more than a plumber right you end up being a good employer you know if you're a really good plumber well then you have some employees you run a business you you you make you you train some other people you enlarge their lives you're kind of a pillar of the community you you have your family one once you pass through that narrow training period which Narrows you and constricts you and develops you at the same time then you can come out the other end with a bunch of

new possibility at H and Yung talked about that he thought that part of the proper path of development in the last half of life was to ReDiscover the child that you left behind as you were apprenticing and so then you get to be something and regain that potential at the same time very very smart well he was very very very smart so that's very wise very wise thing to know so yeah [Music] sacrifice you get to pick your damn sacrifice that's all you don't get to not make one you're sacrificial whether you want to be

or not that's a good thing to know as well I had an interesting experience the other day I went to The Keg I go there because I have food allergies and they're very careful with people who have food allergies and the waiter took me to the table and he said that he had been watching my lectures and that's a very common experience and he was happy about that and he said that he'd had two promotions at The Keg in the last four months because he'd been watching my lectures and I really found that an affecting

experience because you know you might say well he's working as a waiter at The Keg and there's nothing particularly heroic about that and I disagree with that actually because I don't care where you're located you can do a hell of a job and I mean that literally you can take whatever job you have and you can make it a real nice little piece of absolute misery or you can act like a civilized human being and notice that no matter where you are there's a richness and a complexity that's completely inexhaustible right at hand and then

you can take that seriously and you can say well I happen to be a waiter at the cig and and he's a young guy and perhaps that isn't where I want to end up but it's not nothing it's a rich environment and I can make it a lot better if I want to I can get along properly with my co-workers and not gossip behind their back and I can treat my customers properly and if an opportunity comes my way I can take it and I can see what happens and so he said that's what he

had started doing and that things were working out much better for him he was in a much better job than he was 3 months ago and 3 months that's nothing right I mean that's a nice trajectory it's an uphill trajectory and that's what you want really an uphill trajectory is actually even better than being somewhere good as far as I'm concerned because one of the things that really makes your life meaningful is the clear realization that you're headed somewhere better than you are now and then it's even better if you also understand that there's a

direct causal relationship between the things that you're doing and the steepness of that incline and so I get a lot of letters from people like that and they say well you know I've been listening to these lectures and I decided that I'm going to try to take responsibility for my life and so I've started to stop doing all the stupid things that I know that are stupid that I know I shouldn't be doing and I've started doing some of the things that aren't stupid that I know I should be doing which seems pretty obvious really

if you think about it but obvious though it may be that isn't necessarily what people do and then they write and say you can't believe what difference that makes and they're thrilled about it and so I'm thrilled about it when I get letters like that because I I really don't experience anything as better than a letter like that or a message like that because it's so good to see things that aren't so good replaced by something better and I really do think it's an open question I truly believe it's an open question to what degree

we could make things better if that's what we actually aimed at doing well there's two modes of being in the world right there's one where you adopt the responsibility for living properly for being properly and you make the sacrif is necessary for doing that and then everything will flourish properly and the other one is a pathway of resentment and bitterness and rejection and murder and genocide and that just seems exactly right to me and so if the positive path beckons if you can actually see what it is if you can if you can lower yourself

enough to see what it is Yung Carl Yung said once that modern people didn't see God because they didn't look low enough it's a phrase I really really like because people denigrate the opportunities that are right in front of them and there's no reason to do that because what's right in front of you is the Majesty of being that's what's right in front of you it's inexhaustibly complex and full of potential and there's no reason to assume that wherever you happen to be isn't as good a starting place as anywhere else now you know I

know some people have terrible terrible lives they're in situations that are absolutely unbearable and but I also do know that even situations like that can be made a hell of a lot worse by the worst kind of attitude that's for sure so anyway so that's where you are you're in a damaged structure you're a damaged structure you're in a damaged structure but you know at least it's got some walls you know you're not being fed to the Lions on a regular basis so that's a good thing and you can emerge forward heroically to confront the

chaos that constantly threatens the structure within which you live and you can free something as a consequence of that you can learn something you can strengthen yourself that's the other thing because what you're actually made of in in many ways that what informs you What You're Made Of is what you encounter when you voluntarily encounter the unknown and so the more you voluntarily encounter the unknown the more you get made of and the more you get made of the more there is to you and then the more you're good at encountering the unknown and restructuring

order and and calling forth proper order out of the potential of being and God you got to think why wouldn't you do that since you can do that and it's an end L mystery you know I think part of it is that people don't aspire to the highest good because they're deeply ashamed of of themselves and their weaknesses and their insufficiencies and that's not the only reason I mean there's there's the desire to avoid responsibility and there's all the negative motivations as well like resentment and and hatred and the desire to make things worse I

I don't want to you know give us too much of a break but it's something like that it's okay to to not be in a very good place if what you're trying to do with that not very good place is make it better and the fact that things aren't exactly the way they should be at least gives you something to do you know and maybe something great to do because there's no shortage of suffering and trouble that besets the world that you could conceivably ameliorate in some way and the utility of that and the intrinsic

meaning of that is self-evident so it also makes me curious about nihilism for example and despair because I mean I understand those emotions I understand them deeply and the intellectual mindset goes along with it but they just seem beside the point to me in some sense because there are so many things that need doing that all you really have to do is open your eyes and look at them and then decide that you're actually going to do something about them and you might think well what's within my scope of influence is so trivial that it's

not worth doing it's like it won't stay trivial for long if you do it not at all and I don't think it's trivial to begin with I really don't believe that anything done right is Trivial my experience in my life has been that anything I actually did paid off it didn't didn't pay off necessarily in the way that I expected it to pay off that's a whole different story but if it was genuine commitment to do something even if it went sideways and the outcome was really something other than what I expected the net consequence

over time was nothing but good so every new frontier that can be conquered is an advance forward and there's no shortage of Frontier because we're surrounded by the unknown we're surrounded by our our own ignorance and we can continually move into that domain into the domain of chaos or we can restructure pathological order and that's that's the secret to proper being and so then you encounter chaos that way you know and then you can regard yourself as the sort of entity that despite its insufficiency has the capability to conquer chaos despite the danger of that

that's the other thing because the fact that you're fragile is actually a precondition for your heroism because if you weren't fragile then there'd be nothing heroic about doing something difficult right because if you couldn't be hurt or damaged or defeated or or end up in failure then where's the moral courage in the Endeavor it has to be that the fragility is built into the courage and so it's not a it's not a reason not to engage in it at all in in fact quite the contrary and so well and so then you know what do

you do well you you put the city back together and maybe the way you want it so that it's functional and efficient and beautiful and so that people can flourish there and flourish in a manner that makes them that makes them that makes them feel that the unbearable catastrophe of being is worth it for the experience that's what you're aiming at and it's not an impossibility it's not an impossibility and then not only that not only do you repair the city when you do that but you make yourself the sort of thing that continually repairs

the city and that's even better that's the end goal cuz it's not the repair of the city that's the goal it's the transformation of yourself into the thing that continually repairs the city and so there's just no reason for that not to happen and the more it can happen the better okay we're having a conversation I'm deciding I'm going to listen to you right that's different than how people generally communicate because usually when they communicate they're doing something like okay we're going to have a conversation and I'm going to tell you why I'm right and

I'll win if you agree or maybe you're having a conversation where I don't know what you're trying to do maybe you're trying to impress the person you're talking to so you're not listening to them at all you're just thinking about what you're going to say next okay so that's not this this is you might have something to tell me and so I'm going to listen on the off chance that you'll tell me something that would really be useful for me to know and so if you agree with me and I find that out I know

nothing more than I knew before I just know what I knew before and maybe I'm happy about that because you know it didn't get challenged but I'm no smarter than I was before but maybe you're different than me and so I'm listening to you you'll tell me something I don't like maybe it's something I find contemptible or difficult whatever maybe you'll tell me something I don't know and then I won't be quite as stupid and then maybe I won't run painfully into quite as many things and that's a really useful thing to know especially if

you live with someone and you're trying to make long-term peace with them is they are not the same as you and their way they look at the world and the facts that they pull out of the world aren't the same as your facts and even though you're going to be over overwhelmed with the proclivity to demonstrate that you're right it is the case that two brains are better than one and so maybe nine of the 10 things they tell you are dispensable or maybe even 49 out of 50 but one thing all you need to

get out of the damn conversation is one thing you don't know and one of the things that's very cool about a good psychotherapeutic session is that the whole conversation is like that all you're doing is trying to Express the truth of the situation as clearly as possible that's it and so now Roger's proposition and I'll tell you why he derived it was that if you have a conversation like that with someone it will make both of you better it'll make both of you psychologically healthier so there's an implicit presupposition that the exchange of Truth is

Curative well that's a very cool idea idea I mean it's a very deep idea it's the idea upon which Western Civilization although not only Western Civilization is actually predicated the idea that truth produces Health but for Rogers that was the entire purpose of the psychotherapeutic alliance you come to see me because you want to be better you don't even know what that means necessarily neither do I we're going to figure that out together but you come and you say look things are not acceptable to me and maybe there's something I could do about that so

that's the minimal precondition to engage in therapy something's wrong you're willing to talk about it truthfully and you want it to be better without that the therapeutic relationship does not get off the ground and so then you might ask well what relationships are therapeutic and the answer that would be if you have a real relationship it's therapeutic if it isn't what you have is not a relationship God only knows what you have you're a slave they're a tyrant you know you're both butting heads with one another it's a primate dominance hierarchy dispute oh I don't

know you're like two cats in a barrel or two people with their hands around each other's throats but what you have is not a relationship one of the things I try to do in my therapeutic sessions is first of all to listen to really listen and then while I listen I watch and while I'm listening things will happen in my head you know maybe I'll get a little image of something or I'll get a thought or a question will emerge and then I'll just tell the person what that is but it's sort of directionless you

know it's not like I have goal except that we're trying to make things better I'm on the side of the part of the person that wants things to be better not worse and so those parts of us have a dialogue and the consequence of that dialogue is that certain things take place and then I'll just tell the person what happened and it isn't that I'm right that's not the point the point is is that they get to have an hour where someone actually tells them what they think here's the impact you're having on me this

is making me angry this is making me happy this is really interesting this reminds me of something that you said an hour ago that I don't quite understand and the whole point is not for either person to make the proposition or convince the other that their position is correct but merely to have an exchange of experience about how things are set up and it's extraordinarily useful for people because it's often difficult for anyone to find anyone to talk to that will actually listen and so another thing that's really strange about this listening is that if

you listen to people they will tell you the weirdest bloody things so fast you just cannot believe it so if you're having a conversation with someone and it's dull it's because you're not listening to them properly because they're weird they're like wombats or albatrosses or rhinoceroses or something like they're strange creatures and so if you were actually communicating with them and they were telling you how weird they really are it would be anything but boring and you can ask questions that's a really good way of listening but one of Roger points is well you have

to be oriented properly in order to listen and the orientation has to be look what I want out of this conversation is that the place we both end up is better than the place we left that's it that's what I'm after and if you're not after that you got to think why the hell wouldn't you be after that what could you possibly be after that would be better than that you walk away smarter and more well equipped for the world than you were before you had the conversation and so does the other person well maybe

if you're bitter and resentful and angry and anxious and you know generally annoyed at the world then that isn't what you want you want the other person to walk away worse and you too cuz you're full of Revenge but you know you'll get what you want if you do that so we know from our research that such empathic understanding understanding with a person not about him is such an effective approach that it can bring about major changes in personality some of you may be feeling that you listen well to people and that you have never

seen such results the chances are very great that you not been listening in the manner that I've described fortunately I can suggest a little experiment that you can do to test the quality of your understanding the next time you get into an argument with your wife or your friend or a small group of friends stop the discussion for a moment and for an experiment Institute this rule each person can speak up for himself only after he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately what accurately means is they have to agree

with your restatement now that's an annoying thing to do because if someone is talking to you and you disagree with them the first thing you want to do is take their argument make the stupidest possible thing out of it that you can that's the straw man and then demolish it it's like so then you can walk away feeling good about it and you know you dominated them really nicely but that isn't what you do you say okay well I'm going to take what you told me and maybe I'm even going to make your argument stronger

than the one you made that's useful if you're dealing with someone that you have to live with because maybe they can't bloody well expresss very well but they have something to say so you make their argument strong all right then you see what this would mean it would mean that before presenting your own point of view it' be necessary for you to really achieve the other speakers frame of reference to understand his thoughts and feelings so well that you could summarize them for him sounds simple doesn't it but if you will try it you'll find

that it's the most difficult thing that you've ever done who are hoarding are often older orur ologic Al damaged or they have obsessive compulsive disorder but then you walk into their house and there's like 10,000 things in their house there's maybe a hundred boxes and you open up a box and in the Box there's some pens and some old passports and some checks and their collection of silver dollars and some hypodermic needles and some dust and you know a dead mouse and there's boxes and boxes and boxes like that in the house it's absolute chaos

in there absolute chaos not order chaos and then you think is that their house or is that their being is that their mind and the answer is there's no difference there's no difference so you know I could say well if you want to organize your psyche you could start by organizing your room if that would be easier cuz maybe you're a more concrete person and you need something concrete to do so you go clean up under your bed and you make your bed and you organize the papers on your desk and you think well just

exactly what are you organizing are you organizing the objective world or are you organizing your field of being like your field of total experience and Jung believed that and I think there's a Buddhist Doctrine that's sort of nested in there that at the highest level of psychological integration there's no difference between you and what you experience now you think well I can't control everything I experienced but that's no objection because you can't control yourself anyway so the mere fact that you can't extend control over everything you experience is no argument against the idea that you

should still treat that as an extension of yourself well let's say you have a longstanding feud with your brother well is that a psychological problem is that him is it a problem in the objective world or is is it a problem in your field of being and it's very useful to think that way because you might ask what could you do to improve yourself well let's step one step backwards the first question might be why should you even bother improving yourself and I think the answer to that is something like so you don't suffer any

more stupidly than you have to and maybe so others don't have to either it's something like that you know like there's a real injunction at the bottom of it it's not some casual self-help Doctrine it's that if you don't organize yourself properly you'll pay for it and in a big way and so will the people around you and you can say well I don't care about that but that's actually not true you actually do care about that because if you're in pain you will care about it and so you do care about it even if

it's just that negative way it's very rare that you can find someone who's in excruciating pain who would ever say well it would be no better if I was out of this sort of pain is one of those things that brings the idea that it would be better if it didn't exist along with it it's incontrovertible so you get your act together so that there isn't any more stupid pain around you than necessary well so then the question might be well how would you go about getting your act together and the answer to that and

this is a phenomenological idea too it's something like look around for something that bothers you and see if you can fix it you can do this in a room it's quite fun to do it just when you're sitting in a room like a room maybe your bedroom you can sit there and just sort of meditate on it think okay if I wanted to spend 10 minutes making this room better what would I have to do and you have to ask yourself that right it's not a command it's like a genuine question and things will pop

out in the room that you know you like there's a stack of papers over there that's kind of bugging you and you know that maybe maybe little order there would be a good thing and you know you haven't there's some rubbish behind your computer monitor that you haven't attended to for like six months and the room would be slightly better if it was a little less Dusty and the cables weren't all tangled up the same way and if you allow yourself just to consider the expanse in which you exist at that moment there'll be all

sorts of things that'll pop out in it that you could just fix and you know I might say well if you were coming to see me for Psychotherapy this easiest thing for us to do first would just be to get you to organize your room you think well is that Psychotherapy and the answer is well it depends on how you conceive the limits of your being and I would say start where you can start you know if something announces itself to you which is a strange way of thinking about it as in need of repair

that you could repair then hey fix it you fix a hundred things like that your life will be a lot different now I often tell people too fix the things you repeat every day cuz people tend to think of those as trivial right you get up you brush your teeth you have your breakfast you know you have your routines that you go through every day well those probably constitute 50% of your life and people think well they're mundane and I don't need to pay attention to them it's like no no that's exactly wrong the things

you do every day those are the most important things you do hands down all you have to do is do the arithmetic you figured it out right away so 100 adjustments to your broader domain of being and there's a lot less rubbish around and a lot fewer traps for you to step into and so once you've got your mind and your emotions together and once you're acting that out then you can extend what you're willing to consider yourself and start fixing up the things that are part of your broader extent it's very interesting thing to

do I like the idea of the room because you can do that at the drop of a hat you know go back to where you live and sit down and think okay I'm going to make this place better for half an hour what should I do you have to ask and things will just pop up like mad and it's partly because your mind is a very strange thing as soon as you give it an aim a genuine aim it'll reconfigure the world in keeping with that aim that's actually how you see to begin with and

so if you set it a task especially you have to be genuine about it which is why you have to bring your thoughts and emotions together and then you have to get them in your body so you're acting consistently you have to be genuine about the aim but once you aim the world will reconfigure itself around that aim which is very strange and it's technically true you know the best example of that you have all seen this video where you watch the basketballs being tossed back and forth between members of the white team versus the

black team and while you're doing that a gorilla walks up into the middle of the video and you don't see it it's like you know if you thought about that experiment for about 5 years that would be about the right amount of time to spend thinking about it because what it shows you is that you see what you aim at and that man if you can get one thing through your head and as a consequence of even being in University that would be a good one you see what you aim at and so because one

inference you might draw from that is be careful what you aim at right what you aim at determines the way the world manifests itself to you and so if the world is manifesting itself in a very negative way one thing to ask is are you aiming at the right thing now you know I'm not trying to reduce everybody's problems to an improper aim people get cut off at the knees for all sorts of reasons you know they get sick they have accidents there's a random element to being that's for sure and so you don't want

to take anything even that particular phrase too far you want to bind it with the fact that random things do happen to people but it's still a great thing to ask