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January 28 - January 31, 2019
But the wonder of the story is that the water is always flowing somewhere and is available to any intelligent person who has the courage to search out the living water in its current form.
To honor and accept one’s own shadow is a profound spiritual discipline. It is whole-making and thus holy and the most important experience of a lifetime.
The persona is what we would like to be and how we wish to be seen by the world. It is our psychological clothing and it mediates between our true selves and our environment just as our physical clothing presents an image to those we meet. The ego is what we are and know about consciously. The shadow is that part of us we fail to see or know.*
The shadow is that which has not entered adequately into consciousness. It is the despised quarter of our being. It often has an energy potential nearly as great as that of our ego. If it accumulates more energy than our ego, it erupts as an overpowering rage or some indiscretion that slips past us; or we have a depression or an accident that seems to have its own purpose. The shadow gone autonomous is a terrible monster in our psychic house.
We all are born whole but somehow the culture demands that we live out only part of our nature and refuse other parts of our inheritance. We divide the self into an ego and a shadow because our culture insists that we behave in a particular manner.
Some of the pure gold of our personality is relegated to the shadow because it can find no place in that great leveling process that is culture.
To draw the skeletons out of the closet is relatively easy, but to own the gold in the shadow is terrifying.
In tribal cultures, shamans or healers often experience an illness that gives them the insight they need to heal themselves and then bring wisdom to their people. This is often the case for us today. We are still operating with the archetype of the wounded healer who has learned to cure himself and find the gold in his experience.
Generally, the first half of life is devoted to the cultural process—gaining one’s skills, raising a family, disciplining one’s self in a hundred different ways; the second half of life is devoted to restoring the wholeness (making holy) of life.
All our characteristics must appear somewhere in this inventory. Nothing may be left out.
This is how people flip into the opposite of their usual behavior. The alcoholic who suddenly becomes fanatical in his temperance, or the conservative who suddenly throws all caution to the wind, has made such a flip. He has only substituted one side of his seesaw for the other and made no lasting gain.
Whenever we pluck the fruit of creativity from the golden tree our other hand plucks the fruit of destruction. Our resistance to this insight is very high! We would love to have creativity without destruction, but that is not possible.
We must hide our dark side from society in general, or we will be a bloody bore; but we must never try to hide it from ourself.
To create is to destroy at the same moment. We cannot make light without a corresponding darkness.
Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light.*
The more refined our conscious personality, the more shadow we have built up on the other side.
This is one of Jung’s greatest insights: that the ego and the shadow come from the same source and exactly balance each other. To make light is to make shadow; one cannot exist without the other.
Wherever we find ourselves, we need to honor the part of life that lies in shadow, to redeem those qualities we have forgotten or ignored. To refuse the dark side of one’s nature is to store up or accumulate the darkness; this is later expressed as a black mood, psychosomatic illness, or unconsciously inspired accidents.
George Bernard Shaw said that the only alternative to torture is art.
Apparently, the collective need for shadow expression supersedes the individual determination to contain the dark. And so it happens that an era of disciplined creativity is always followed by an astounding display of annihilation.
Unless we do conscious work on it, the shadow is almost always projected; that is, it is neatly laid on someone or something else so we do not have to take responsibility for it.
If you wish to give your children the best possible gift, the best possible entree into life, remove your shadow from them.
Jung used to say that we can be grateful for our enemies, for their darkness allows us to escape our own.
The difficulty is that most of us live in an intricate web of shadow exchange that robs both parties of their potential wholeness.
People are as frightened of their capacity for nobility as of their darkest sides. If you find the gold in someone he will resist it to the last ounce of his strength.
Two things go wrong if we project our shadow: First, we do damage to another by burdening him with our darkness—or light, for it is as heavy a burden to make someone play hero for us.
If you can touch your shadow—within form—and do something out of your ordinary pattern, a great deal of energy will flow from it.
Heaven and skid row are separated only by an act of consciousness.
Remember, a symbolic or ceremonial experience is real and affects one as much as an actual event. The psyche is unaware of the difference between an outer act and an interior one.
Reality (and if this is not God I have no idea of what is) is not found in any single view of life, no matter how attractive that view may be, but in the wholeness of our own experience.
Isak Dinesen, the Danish author of Out of Africa, once wrote that there are three occasions for true happiness in human beings. The first is a surplus of energy. The second is the cessation of pain. The third is the absolute certainty that one is doing the will of God.
To own one’s own shadow is to prepare the ground for spiritual experience.
When the unstoppable bullet hits the impenetrable wall, we find the religious experience. It is precisely here that one will grow.
To consent to paradox is to consent to suffering that which is greater than the ego.
To make any well formed sentence is to make unity out of duality. This is immensely healing and restorative. We are all poets and healers when we use language correctly.
If you build mainly on nouns it will be weak; if you rely on adjectives and adverbs you have lost your way. The verb is holy ground, the place of the mandorla.
If these two extremes can be woven together to make a masterpiece, perhaps I can bring the ragged, disjointed elements of my own life together.
If one makes mandorla in the privacy of his interior life, it is heard for more than a thousand miles.
