I was writing on my personal blog about seeing the film The Matrix last night when I realized I wanted to mention a connection between the film and my book, Practically Shameless.

I hadn't seen The Matrix for quite a few years, and I had a new insight seeing it last night: I think this film is both about and aimed at young men who are into computers, many of whom will likely be Enneagram Fives, a personality type that uses detachment as a core strategy.

In my experience, Fives often hold a belief that they're "bad" and sometimes even feel a bit proud of that, as if their "badness" makes them cool. Examples include computer hackers, Hells Angels-type bikers, and the cartoonist Gary Larson ("The Far Side"). 

In Shadow Work when a person believes they're "bad," we offer them a kind of process called the predator, which I described in some detail in Chapters 10 and 11 of Practically Shameless.  In doing a predator process, a person discovers that their "badness" isn't bad at all but is simply Divinely-given power that we learned to use in "bad" ways.  

That process of revealing "badness" as inherently Divine often looks like alchemy or magic, as if something gross and filthy has been turned into gold. And that's exactly what happens in The Matrix: Neo is breaking the law, is told by the agents that he's bad, and in transforming himself with Morpheus' help into the predestined agent of humanity's salvation, he becomes capable of magic -- he can stop bullets, run up walls, etc.