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September 27, 2019 - December 15, 2020
Many people fail to find their God-given living water because they are not prepared to search in unusual places.
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.
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.
Indeed, this kind of intense experience may be necessary to show us that an important part of us is lying dormant or unused.
We are still operating with the archetype of the wounded healer who has learned to cure himself and find the gold in his experience.
The word religion means to re-relate, to put back together again, to heal the wounds of separation.
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.
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.
Sainthood has been caricatured as an image of the all-right person, the person who has transferred everything to the perfect side of his personality.
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.
The more refined our conscious personality, the more shadow we have built up on the other side.
Dr. Jung often greeted a friend by asking, “Had any terrible successes lately?” because he also was aware of the close proximity of light and darkness.
What a wonderful age! But its shadow appears, inevitably, as boredom and loneliness—the exact opposites of the efficient society we have made.
the cross, is a double seesaw with the two axis crossing at the center. It provides the framework for balancing the right and left and also the high and the low. If one can honor this equilibrium and the inclusiveness implied in it, one will be truly catholic (meaning whole or complete).
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. This means we will engage in our creativity (in the ceremonial or symbolic world) or have to face its alternative, brutality.
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.
We are left as less than whole personalities when we invest our own darkness into something outside ourselves. Projection is always easier than assimilation.
I trained the woman to refuse his shadow—neither to fight nor to withdraw into icy solitude but simply to stay grounded in herself.
The priest did the villagers a great service by his silence;
Love is the one word in our Western tradition adequate to describe this synthesis of ego and shadow.
Our hero-worshiping capacity is pure shadow; in this case our finest qualities are refused and laid on another.
The ego is…primarily engaged in its own defense and the furtherance of its own ambitions. Everything that interferes with it must be repressed. The [repressed] elements…become the shadow. Often these are basically positive qualities.
People are as frightened of their capacity for nobility as of their darkest sides.
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.
To our surprise, that middle ground is not the gray compromise that we feared but the place of ecstasy and joy.
Ancient China called this the Tao and said the middle way is not a compromise but a creative synthesis.
The early part of adulthood is devoted almost entirely to discipline. One prepares for a profession, learns the social graces, cultivates a marriage, and improves one’s earning capacity—and all of these activities invariably create a large shadow.
First you must have the contents of both your ego and your shadow in your two hands—a difficult task to accomplish! No one can do anything with a part of one’s nature one does not know anything about.
Our own Scripture tells us, “If thy eye be single, thy whole body shall be filled with light” (Matt. 6:22). The singleness of the eye, the center of the seesaw, is the place of enlightenment.
the shadow, in Jung’s early usage, was anything that lay in the unconscious part of one’s personality.
Most marriages in the West begin with a projection, go through a period of disillusionment, and, God willing, become more human.
If we can survive this, then we have human love—far less exciting than divine love, but far more stable.
While contradiction is static and unproductive, paradox makes room for grace and mystery.
The religious faculty is the art of taking the opposites and binding them back together again, surmounting the split that has been causing so much suffering.
paradox, where we are able to entertain simultaneously two contradictory notions and give them equal dignity. Then,
To heal, to bond, to join, to bridge, to put back together again—these are our sacred faculties.
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.
the noble status of paradox. It is good to win; it is also good to lose. It is good to have; it is also good to give to the poor. Freedom is good; so is the acceptance of authority.
the most valuable experience of the Christian life is the unitive vision, that most treasured experience of mystical theology, which is won by surrendering to paradox.
Fanaticism is always a sign that one has adopted one of a pair of opposites at the expense of the other.
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To own one’s own shadow is to prepare the ground for spiritual experience.
Conflict to paradox to revelation; that is the divine progression.
People come to the consulting room and lay out a collision of values with great embarrassment and agony. They want resolution but would have something even greater if they could ask for the consciousness to bear the paradox.
When the unstoppable bullet hits the impenetrable wall, we find the religious experience. It is precisely here that one will grow.
It is meant to be a situation without solution: the unconscious wants the hopeless conflict in order to put ego-consciousness up against the wall, so that the man has to realize that whatever he does is wrong, whichever way he decides will be wrong. This is meant to knock out the superiority of the ego, which always acts from the illusion that it has the responsibility of decision.
In religious language you could say that the situation without issue is meant to force the man to rely on an act of God.
Normally, the anima does not take a man by the hand and lead him right up to Paradise; she puts him first into a hot cauldron where he is nicely roasted for a while.*
