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December 10 - December 14, 2023
As promised of the living water, our shadow costs nothing and is immediately—and embarrassingly—ever present. 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.*
Generally, the ordinary, mundane characteristics are the norm. Anything less than this goes into the shadow. But anything better also goes into the shadow! 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.
Curiously, people resist the noble aspects of their shadow more strenuously than they hide the dark sides. To draw the skeletons out of the closet is relatively easy, but to own the gold in the shadow is terrifying. It is more disrupting to find that you have a profound nobility of character than to find out you are a bum.
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.
St. Augustine, in The City of God, thundered, ’To act is to sin.” To create is to destroy at the same moment. We cannot make light without a corresponding darkness.
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.
We are left as less than whole personalities when we invest our own darkness into something outside ourselves. Projection is always easier than assimilation.
The term bogey man has an interesting origin: in old India each community chose a man to be the “bogey.” He was to be slaughtered at the end of the year and to take the evil deeds of the community with him. The people were so grateful for this service that until his death the bogey was not required to do any work and could have anything he wanted. He was treated as a representative of the next world. Since he had the power of the collective shadow in him he was supremely powerful and feared. From India through the West we still have the threat ’The bogey man will get you if you are not good!”
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If you wish to give your children the best possible gift, the best possible entree into life, remove your shadow from them. To give them a clean heritage, psychologically speaking, is the greatest legacy. And, incidentally, you will go far in your own development by taking your shadow back into your private psychological structure—where it first originated and where it is required for your own wholeness.
Jung used to say that we can be grateful for our enemies, for their darkness allows us to escape our own.
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. Second, we sterilize ourselves by casting off our shadow. We then lose a chance to change and miss the fulcrum point, the ecstatic dimension of our own lives.
Parrots learn profanity more easily than common phrases since we utter our curses with so much vigor. The parrot doesn’t know the meaning of these words, but he hears the energy invested in them. Even animals can pick up on the power we have hidden in the shadow!
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.
Romantic love, or falling in love, is different from loving, which is always a quieter and more humanly proportioned experience. There is always something overblown and bigger-than-life about falling in love.
Most marriages in the West begin with a projection, go through a period of disillusionment, and, God willing, become more human. That is to say, they come to be based on the profound reality that is the other person. While in-loveness is close proximity to God, love based on reality serves our humble condition far better.
One does a curious kind of insult to another by falling in love with him, for we are really looking at our own projection of God, not at the other person.
Contradiction brings the crushing burden of meaninglessness. One can endure any suffering if it has meaning; but meaninglessness is unbearable. Contradiction is barren and destructive, yet paradox is creative. It is a powerful embracing of reality. All religious experience in its historical form is expressed in paradox; observe the Christian creeds that have been formulated in such paradoxical language. While contradiction is static and unproductive, paradox makes room for grace and mystery.
Truths always come in pairs and one has to endure this to accord with reality. To suffer means to allow; and in this sense one suffers the mystery of duality. Whenever you do this, something immediately does that. Such is reality.
When the unstoppable bullet hits the impenetrable wall, we find the religious experience. It is precisely here that one will grow. Jung once said, “Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next.” The ego is fashioned like the metal between the hammer and the anvil.
To consent to paradox is to consent to suffering that which is greater than the ego. The religious experience lies exactly at that point of insolubility where we feel we can proceed no further. This is an invitation to that which is greater than one’s self.
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. One makes a mandorla every time one says something that is true.
Human speech is more effective if it relies mainly on verbs. 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.
