I asked my main main in Shanghai, Kane Vast to finish off this series since Shanghai is his stomping ground.  He willingly agreed to help me out and I'm really thankful for that because he'll be able to give you way better insider knowledge of the scene than I can.

When I originally asked him to put something together he wrote THOUSANDS of words, so I've decided to break it up into some smaller chunks for easy consumption.

Anyway, enough of me, let's get to what you really want to know...

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Thanks for dropping by, Kane.

We'll have the next post up in about a week so look for it.

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A few weeks back a girl I know posted on facebook, "I miss falling in love."  I responded with, "Falling in love is easy, staying in love is the hard part."

As I mentioned in the previous post, falling in love is when we project our golden shadow on to another person.  I'm not exactly sure why we do this, but I have a few ideas because even now with all my experience with women, I find it hard not to get swept away when I meet a really gorgeous, fun woman.

I think part of it is the depth of the unknown in that person.  We know so little about them, it's easy for us to make up stories about what they are truly like.  In a really fascinating book about the potential for artificial intelligence called On Intelligence which I read several years ago, the author talks about how the human brain is a prediction machine.

Every stimuli has a neuronal firing pattern that allows us to distinguish between the taste of chocolate and the taste of dirt.  Our experiences growing up especially at as children create the neuronal firing patterns and pathways in our brains and those that are used the most are the quickest and most easily accessed while the unused ones atrophy away.

Hence you can always ride a bike once you've learned how but it takes a while to get those neuronal pathways firing well enough for you to do it as well as you did it when you were a kid.

The most intersting thing is that when these start firing there's a kind of chain reaction that is especially strong among the most heavily trafficked and wide pathways which is why when you learn somethig new that's very similar to something you already know, unless you pay close attention, you'll find yourself reverting to the old pattern.

When we meet a woman and things are going well our neurons start firing away and we start predicting what this person is like.  The problem, of course, is that what we're using to predict what she's like is based on how we see ourselves. 

Cross cultural communication is difficult just because we automatically impute our own drives, motives and understandings into other people's actions.  (We do this just as often with those who are close to us too.)

Additionally because our shadow has to be expressed in some way, the other person acts as a blank screen onto which we can project our repressed golden shadow.

 One thing that particularly struck me when I was reading Overcoming Your Shadow though, was that there is definitely a side benefit to projecting all of these positive traits and putting a woman on a pedestal.

If she likes us back--if the near perfect being likes us back from up on their pedestal, then we must be pretty great ourselves and I think that's one of the main reasons men persist in pedestaling women.

In Part VI I'm going to talk why regression is an important part of emotional connection and how that relates to the concept of the shadow.

In Part IV, I'm going talk about dealing with women's shadows.  Because that's a large part of pickup in the final analysis.  The only way to leave the shadow out of it is with arranged marriages, where you could appeal to the woman's family with logic and they would marry her off to you.

Not anymore...the ironic thing is that many(most?) men still think, as I once did, that appealing to women's logic, their persona、 is what's going to get you the chick.  Often times, it goes something like this, "I was nice, I have a good job, and I took her out and paid for everything.  Therefore she should want to be my girlfriend, or at least fuck me."

Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.  If it did, I never would have learned game.

As I said in part II, most(all?) of our motivations are in our subconscious and a large portion of that is in our Shadow.  Many of our actions in life are to find ways to express our shadows without violating social norms.

Pickup really is about letting women express their shadow in spite of social conditioning while doing it in such a way that they don't "feel bad".  And this is what makes it so difficult.

If you look out my go to movie, Titanic you can see this in action.  Rose feels OK about being a "slut" because:

1) It's "true love"(golden shadow)

2) She begins to see her normal world as being bad(actually, in Titanic, Jack was in a fairly good position because she was already disenchanted and just didn't know that there could be something different).

In fact she was on "death ground" when he met her, literally, since she was planning to jump and kill herself.  So at that point she was pretty desperate to try anything and Jack showed up and gave her a new way to look at and experience life.

Most of us aren't so lucky to happen upon the desperate(nor would you want to, believe me!), plus, we've got an even more serious problem when it comes to Asian women:

The social conditioning is much more rigid than in the west AND the realities are that women logically need men more in Asia and thus who they fuck and marry and have relationships with is more important than it is for Western women who can take care of themselves, "Thank you very much."

Women who Robert Greene, in his book

This is why there is  a certain "type" of girl that you consistently see dating foreigners:

-Overcoming Your shadow, where the author talks about falling in love as projecting the good points of your shadow on to another person.  And this is exactly why the exotic fetishist is so easily drawn to foreigners.

It also explains why Rose(in Titanic) is drawn to Jack who embodies all of the traits that her upper class upbringing have forced her to repress.  And that it what I'll write about in part V--the concept of falling in love as projecting your shadow out there.

If there's any aspect that I've covered that you think isn't clear or that you'd like me to go into more, by all means let me know.  Your feedback and thoughts help to sharpen my own thinking.

Also, I suggest you read this article on the concept of the Jungian shadow.

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Guys learning game and in the pickup community tend to have a lot of sexual desires in their shadows. 

In Owning Your Own Shadow the author says that you can think of your shadow and your persona as being on opposite sides of a scale and that the two have to be in balance.  You can do that, either by actively finding ways to express your shadow, or by moving things over from your shadow into your persona(ie learning to make those things part of the character you portray to others).

I think that this is why guys who learn game, become waaaaay more balanced as people.  They find healthy ways(through relationships with women, short or long term) to express the sexual side that they've been repressing for lack of satisfactory outlets. 

In men I would say that one major part of the shadow side of their sexuality is the rapist.  In women, I'd say the shadow side is the whore/slut(which of course brings ust Pretty Woman and Titanic, but more on that later).

So, the rapist wants to have sex with a woman just because he finds her physically attractive.  The internal DNA instructions are saying, "IMPREGNATE HER!" which comes out in normal human language as, "Holy shit, I want to fuck that girl!" or some variation thereof.

Instead of slinking off into the corner and masterbating(though they may still do that too) is that guys can also indulge in their fantasies by walking up to the girl and actually opening up the possibility of having a relationship(sexual or otherwise) without vilolating any social rules.

This is a huge leap. 

I knew this guy who if a girl had sex with him, she was automatically a slut.  It was the weirdest thing and reminded me of the old Graucho Marx quote, "I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT PEOPLE LIKE ME AS A MEMBER."

But when you look at this behavior from the concept of the shadow it begins to make total sense.  If he's expressing aspects of himself that shouldn't be expressed(ie are not acceptable in society) then any woman who accepts that part of him undermines his persona and must be degraded and discarded(ie "sacrificed").

In some ways, the situation of women in the early nineteenth century
has become generalized in the early twenty-first. The outlets for male bad
behavior—war, dirty politics, the institution of mistresses and courtesans—
have faded away; today, not just women but men are supposed to be emi¬
nently civilized and reasonable. And many have a hard time living up to
this. As children we are able to vent the darker side of our characters, a side
that all of us have. But under pressure from society (at first in the form
of our parents), we slowly repress the naughty, rebellious, perverse streaks
in our characters. To get along, we learn to repress our dark sides, which
become a kind of lost self, a part of our psyche buried beneath our polite
appearance.

-The Art of Seduction by Robert Greene, p. 354

 Suggested Reading:



This is Sexual Kimchi here and when I read RedpoleQ's 1st article on the shadow, I wanted to get in on the action since this is an area I really found useful to explore in my own life.

Lets start with an exercise in Shadow work. (Don’t read the whole article, until you’ve done the exercise.)

First, take a piece of paper and fold it in half. Now, I want you to think of someone you genuinely admire. Write their name in the top of one of the columns. Take a couple of minutes and really picture them in your head. It can be someone famous, someone from you life, or a fictional character. Use as many details as possible. Visualize the person, the details, the context, and add in all of the sensory input that you associate with this person. Now I want you to write down all of their attributes that you admire in one column. Give the whole thing about 10 minutes.

Now, take a break. Get up, walk around, put Beastie Boys’ “Check Your Head” on. Pogo.

Then, when you are done with that nonsense, sit down and think of someone you despise. Same as before, although this time it works better if it is someone you have personal experience with. Write their name down at the top of the other side of the paper. Imagine all of the details of that person. How they look, how they talk, their body language. Write down all of the characteristics of that person that makes you hate them. Write for 10 minutes.

Take a look at both sides of the paper, then scroll down.

Guess what? Both of them are you. Those attributes you have listed are parts of yourself that you have projected onto others. “If you spot it, you got it”. We become unduly annoyed or enraptured by certain things in others because those are the parts of ourself that we are suppressing. That is your shadow getting out. No matter how hard we try to contain it, the thing keeps slipping out.

(If you are anything like me, you would look at that list and see that there are obvious contradictions on it. How can I be both brave and a coward, for example? To put it simply, we are all different people in different contexts. It is quite possible for one person to be brave in one context and a coward in another.)

The shadow is the parts of ourselves we don’t own up to. That can be the “best” and “worst” parts of ourselves.

As we grew up, we all learned that certain parts of ourselves are socially unacceptable.

I see the shadow as being the metaphorical outcome of the socialization process. Think about being a kid again. Think of all the instruction your parents gave you on how to be a good boy or girl, and how they discouraged antisocial behaviour. Think about the pressure you felt to fit in with your friends, and how they discouraged anyone from being different. Its just part of being a social animal. We’ve all been conditioned by others and have modeled others, to the point where a vast amount of Us isn’t really us. And the Us that doesn’t get exercised gets thrown into the shadow.

Jung said we have psychological “gold” in our shadows. That they are a massive source of creative energy and fulfillment. The hard part is tapping into that energy.

There is so much information out there about meeting women and dating.  There's complete stories for you to repeat, games you can play, concepts to master, etc.

BUT, it really comes down to two things, and everything about picking up and dating women is at essence about these two things.  When you know and understand what these two things are, you can improve your success rate much more easily than most guys can.

Most guys who are learning this stuff want to know EVERYTHING.  In fact you're probably reading this because you're a logical guy who wants to know how to get from point A to point D and doesn't want to step out the door until you have full color map with all the detours highlighted in yellow so that you'll be ready for any and every contingency.

Unfortunately, what that means is that you're still sitting at home rather than having a great time with the ladies.  Whatever your level of skill with women is now, you can have more success just based on simple math.

Here it is, the first thing you need to do to improve your success with women:

1) Increase the total number of interactions you have with women

What a relief, right?  Because what it means, is that whatever your level of skill is with women right now, there are some that you could have success with.  Trust me on this.

Even the lamest of the lame guys get laid occasionally.  So you have to get out there and meet more women.  If you do that and nothing else, you will have more success--more phone numbers, more dates, and more sex.  You can't not--it's simple math.

And now the second thing:

2) Increase the effectiveness of each interaction

I'm talking about increasing those percentages, so that instead of 100 interactions to get 1 number, you only need 50 to get 1, and then 20 to get 1.  I'm talking about improving so that instead of 50 phone numbers to get one date, you only need 30, or only 10.

And most deliciously of all, going from needing to go on dates with 30 women to have sex with 1, you can reduce that number to 10 or even 5. I bet that would make dating a lot more exciting for you, wouldn't it?

You need a two pronged attack. 

When my father was a kid, he used to tell my grandmother that he was worried about becoming perfect.  Her answer, "No danger".

Instead of worrying about being perfect, go out there and put those numbers in your favor.  Because you can have more success if you change nothing at all about yourself, and with even small improvements you can make that success come faster.

First, the definition(taken from dictionary.com)

----
Adventure:
–noun

1. an exciting or very unusual experience.

2. participation in exciting undertakings or enterprises: the spirit of adventure.

3. a bold, usually risky undertaking; hazardous action of uncertain outcome.

4. a commercial or financial speculation of any kind; venture.
----

Common wisdom is that everyone and especially women like adventure but as with most common wisdom, while it's not quite wrong, it's far from entirely right.

So, last time I was in Seoul again, I found myself once AGAIN looking for a new girl.  With my rather unconventional lifestyle and frequent travel, it's worked out that every time I've gotten a girl here, the relationship hasn't continued when I've returned.

This is frustratingly annoying to say the least.  There are some guys that are always out for novelty and the thrill of the hunt, but that's not my bag.  As a friend of mine said, "I don't like to hunt 'em, I like to farm 'em!"

While I've been here I've had a chance to chill out, read, exercise and muse over things while living with eNeRGy, and BlueM and Vision just upstairs.  That means I get a constant stream of data about the pickup and dating scene here and of course a broad range of guys coming at it from different angles.

And while I was walking down to get some food from the local "Kimbap Heaven" restaurant, I had a realization about the nature of adventure and what it means when it comes to dating and relationships.

We make a big mistake when we assume that more is better.  So if you take a guy who enjoys his typical 9-5 job and is gradually working his way up the corporate ladder and enjoys rock climbing on weekends, that's pretty cool.  No doubt about that.

But it begs the question, of whether the guy who sold his company for tens of millions of dollars and now spends his time traveling the world living where he wants to live when he wants to live there, is better. 

This second guy is definitely more exciting and adventurous but he's beyond the comfort zone of most women.  Even though they may be very interested and think it's a extremely cool lifestyle, that's a far cry from actually being with him.

The vast majority of women would go with guy number 1 any day of the week over guy number 2. 

And the reason is that guy number 2 is a big risk.  She has to leave her regular work-a-day lifestyle, quit her job, give up her career so she can have no idea where she'll be or what she'll be doing 6 months from now.

And that is more pressure than most women can bear--especially asian women.

I was thinking about this recently because I'm here in Phuket, Thailand which is a developing country at best and even here, women are not rushing to marry a foreigner and run off to Europe or America.  They want to stay here where it's comfortable.

I was talking to a long term resident here and he said that most guys think they'll come over here, find a "nice" woman and take her bag, but more often than not, when he sends that money over for a plane ticket instead of buying a ticket she gets herself some new clothes and gold for her mom.

That explains a lot, but now you're wondering how you can use this information and I'll cover that in another post.