Archive for the 'shadow' Category

What lies beneath

Published
by
Ken
on August 28, 2008
in shadow and wholeness
. 0 Comments

We were in Charlotte a few weeks ago and in the hotel was this beautiful water display. The water flowed from the back to the front, over smooth stones, and fell in a tiny waterfall at the front edge. It was beautiful and tranquil and calming. I was fascinated by the waves and ripples caused by stones just below the surface or slightly protruding out of the water. I watched bubbles float on the water: some made it to the waterfall to tumble over while others were captured in the eddies behind the stones and were stuck, unmoving until their inevitable demise.

My daughter was equally fascinated by the display but her attention was held by the stones, themselves, rather than by their effect on the water and bubbles. Every time we left the hotel, she wanted to pick out one of the stones and take it with her. When we returned, she’d toss it back into the water and pick out another one to take up to the room.

It was a unique and fascinating dynamic sculpture that evoked a tranquility from the soul.

Then I looked more closely …

Despite the water’s constant motion, there were scummy blobs and strands sticking to the stones. There was a rusty, open safety pin lying on top of one of the stones. The waterfall ended in an off-colored, bubbly froth that brought to mind scenes of industrial waste being dumped into the water supply of an unsuspecting rural town.

In short, the closer I looked the more my stomach was turned and the less tranquil became my soul. The water and stones were beautiful from afar but close-up all their faults became visible. Sort of like those mirrors in hotel rooms—the round ones with the light and the one side magnifies your face to ungodly proportions so you can see everything. And I mean everything. Yuck!

But, despite how revolting it may appear, the face in that mirror, in all it’s massive grandeur, is my face. And there’s nothing I can do about it.

Well, there is one thing I can do: accept it!

As James McGrath points out on Exploring Our Matrix (and whose post’s title subliminally infected my mind so much that I “independently” came up with the exact same title for this post) some of the scum that lies beneath our beautiful exterior needs to be purged, expunged, extirpated. And it is very important to be self aware enough that you know where the scum is and where the weak floor-boards are.

But some of it is simply there and cannot be “rennovated.” We all have a history. We all have biases and prejudices and a worldview that influences—defines—who we are and what we do. And it is not a simple matter to tear out these defining ideas and install new, better ones. So, all we can do is accept that they are there, accept ownership of them, and become aware of how they define us.

It is only by getting to know ourselves that we can have any hope of transforming ourselves. If we continually deny our ugly bits then we’ll never understand their effect on us and, therefore, never have any chance of transforming ourselves.

So, as McGrath points out, “We should investigate deeper than we do when we have opportunity to do so.” It’s not easy and it’s not always the most comfortable task, but it is necessary.

“Who Dies?” by Stephen Levine

Published
by
Ken
on March 20, 2007
in carl jung, shadow, stephen levine, who dies? and wholeness
. 0 Comments

I just started reading Who Dies? by Stephen Levine. Tim Freke recommended this book and I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj to a mutual friend and I am deeply indebted to him. Tim is an amazing person and if you ever get the chance to attend one of his events I highly recommend doing so. Here are a few paragraphs from Chapter 2 of Who Dies?:

There is so much of ourselves we wish not to experience. So much fear, guilt, anger, confusion, and self-pity. Sop much self-doubt, so many weak excuses. Is it any wonder, considering the bizarre insistence of our conditioning — the conflict of one value system with another in the mind — that we feel so incomplete. One moment the mind is saying. “Take a big piece,” and then the next it says, “I wouldn’t have done that if I were you.” No wonder we are all crazy, so fractured, trying to protect ourselves from who we fear we are. We dare not share out minds with anyone, even ourselves. We are so frightened of who we might , of not being loved or lovable for the convolutions of our thoughts.

But states of mind, though uninvited, are constantly coming and going, and some we wish would ever come again. They do, and we find ourselves scrambling for leverage to keep our fear down, experiencing the nausea of our immense insecurity and self-loathing.

This persistent elimination from awareness of unwanted states of mind leaves us constantly feeling threatened as we look and say regretfully, “That can’t be me, that fear isn’t really who I am. Anger isn’t me. That self-hatred, that guilt, can’t be who I am.” But there it is. And you wonder who you really are. How do you open to that which you deny? That which you think somehow shouldn’t be there even though it is?

We wish we were otherwise and that is our hell, our resistance to life.

It is almost as though we have become a fractured image of our original being. Our experience with the world has become like looking into a mirror that a great stone has fallen on and shattered into hundreds of pieces, broken from a single unified reality into some splintered reflection of what is seen, of what is imagined to exist. As we look at this fractured reality, we notice with dismay certain parts of the reflection are not what we wish to see or want to be seen. “I don’t want anyone so see my lust; that’s not such a good thing to have. I’m not supposed to be like that. No one’s mind is as crazy as mine.” So we take a piece out. “Oh, there I am really sorry for myself. If they only knew what my life had been like! Ah, but they don’t.” And that piece is removed as well. You notice your greed and self-interest, the sexual fantasies, the competition and confusion of the mind. And you start picking these pieces out. Because these are unacceptable parts of who you think you are supposed to be.

But I think it is very useful, and indeed more accurate, to call it “the mind” instead of “my mind.”

Because when you call it “my mind” you start removing so many pieces that when you look down at this fractured mirror it reflects back very little of what is real. It only displays those qualities you wish to project as being who you are, eliminating all the rest, eluding your wholeness. We thing we have something to hide. Yet this self-protection is our imprisonment. Imagine if for the next twenty-four hours you had to wear a cap that amplified your thoughts so that everyone within a hundred yards of you could hear every thought that passed through your head. Imagine if the mind were broadcast so that all about you could overhear “your” thoughts and fantasies, “your” dreams and fears. How embarrassed or fearful would you be to go outside? How long would you let your fear of the mind continue to isolate you from the hearts of others? And though this experiment sounds like one which few might care to participate in, imagine how freeing it would be at last to have nothing to hide. And how miraculous it would be to see that all others’ minds too were filled with the same confusion and fantasies, the same insecurity and doubt. How long would it take the judgemental mind to begin to release its grasp, to see through the illusion of separateness, to recognize with some humor the craziness of all beings’ minds, the craziness of mind itself?

To be whole we must deny nothing.

What Levine is saying here really fits in well with the Jungian idea of “the shadow” and how we must integrate our shadow into our lives instead of continuing to repress and deny it. Robert Bly has a marvelous book called A Little Book on the Human Shadow. It truly is “little” — you can easily read the whole thing in one short sitting. In it, Bly compares our shadow with a bag that we drag around behind us and into which we put all the things from ourselves that don’t “work.” All our “negative” traits that we are not “supposed” to have or that are not “socially acceptable” or that are not “religiously acceptable” are shoved into our bag. The problem is that when something happens that triggers the release of one of these emotions — and that inevitably will happen — it comes roaring out of the bag like a sumo wrestler on PCP. If we don’t integrate our shadow it reacts out of our control and that’s not a pretty sight.

As C.G. Jung said: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.”