Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power (A method for getting what you want by getting off on what you don't)

by Carolyn Elliott

“Until you make the unconscious, conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it Fate.”

as long as we have unconscious (repressed, denied, disowned) enjoyment in some “bad” thing in our lives, we will keep seeking out that very same “bad” thing; we'll perpetuate it without even realizing that we're doing so.

setting aside shame and blame is what allows us to make the enjoyment conscious, and thereby lets us remove its power to sneakily control us.

the minute that we're willing to make that previously unconscious pleasure a conscious one—-the minute we're willing to deliberately celebrate it and savor it—we create a massive pattern interrupt.

often sensations that we experience as terrible or painful are just pleasure without approval.

one day the great Kore got bored with being the solitary, boundlessly powerful ruler of the Underworld. She decided she wanted some drama to break up the eternal monotony of being complete-unto-herself, omniscient, and omnipotent. So, the Kore split in two: she created a benevolent, sweet, conscious self and a vicious, unconscious divine twin, Pluto.

Pluto, the Unconscious Divine, hateful as he seems, is in truth our own creation, a kind and devoted lover, and that all the vast power of Pluto becomes available to us when we remember this, forgive him, take responsibility for our own experience of his power (which was really ours all along), and love him.

We all embody duality—we all have both light (conscious) and dark (unconscious) dimensions

transmute that feeling of “wrongness” into raw, hot, glorious power.

The very act of trying to be un-terrible generally makes one more certain that one is terrible.

the logic of “I can only get this terrible relationship because I am terrible” was not true. Rather the following realization was true: I have this terrible relationship because my unconscious secretly likes feeling maniacally controlled by an evil outside agency.

reality is fractal and holographic. Tiny changes that you make within yourself can have dramatic effects in the “external” world because you and the “external” world are not truly separate. In other words, magic is possible because of the fractal and holographic nature of reality. When you change something “small” within yourself or your immediate environment, you automatically change something very “large”—the whole world. This means that we are never not doing magic. We are always doing magic, we are always exerting influence. It's just that habitually, humans tend to do magic that's either just plain boring or destructive (there's that shadow again).

Mastering practical magic involves learning what changes in yourself and your environment correspond to changes in the “outer” world of your experience.

The basic formula for profound alchemical change is solve et coagula, which means: to first utterly dissolve (solve) an existing form and then to carefully bring the dissolved and purified elements together again (coagula) in a whole new, more potent and finely organized, permutation.

one has not done solve processes on the underlying unconscious shadow patterns, desires, qualities, and beliefs that created sucky situations in your life to begin with—then all the visualizing and affirming in the world can only bring you shells of outwardly changed circumstances, sans genuinely satisfying fulfillment.

the dissolving, the uncovering, and ultimately, the embracing of your kinky-ass shadow. What is your existential kink? Have you met your shadow?

when a person does not know how to become conscious of their own vast unconscious (and most people haven't the faintest idea of how to do this), they tend to be controlled by it, meaning their lives are dominated and limited by stubborn and painful patterns kept in motion by their disowned unconscious desires . . . which is something that no amount of visualizing or affirming can fix.

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

you are not knowingly aware of them, so they do not seem like they are yours at all!).

because these taboo desires of yours have been disowned and repressed, you won't recognize their fulfillments as fulfillments. Instead these fulfillments of your deepest desires will often seem to your conscious mind like awful calamities.

As long as Alex refuses to consciously enjoy his circumstance, he'll be inclined to see himself as a loser and a failure, he'll lose confidence, and he'll stay stuck.

think of how many people you know who are stuck in relationships or careers or mindsets that aren't working. From the outside, you can see that if only they took a few simple steps they could change their whole world, but they don't take those steps—they won't take those steps. Why? They're being ruled by their unconscious, and the foul scenes that they themselves are creating and perpetuating just seem to them to be their unwelcome Fate.

Dissolving unconscious patterns by making them conscious (and thereby integrating your being, your will) allows you to wake up out of this powerlessness and become the captain of the ship of your own life.

make conscious the unconscious pleasure that we take in the stuck, painful patterns of our lives. Through consciously enjoying and giving approval to these previously unconscious “guilty pleasures,” we interrupt and end the stuck patterns so that we can get what we really want in our lives.

We become undeniably, tangibly aware of the divine presence, the spark of Godself within us. We start to perceive our lives from the perspective of the divine curiosity within us, instead of from our grasping egos.

inner divinity ceases to be a sweet, comforting New Age idea and instead becomes a tangible, electrifying, felt reality.

we are each innately curious about and desirous for the full spectrum of potential experience, both the painful and the pleasurable, the evil and the good, the ugly and the beautiful.

we rarely get what we consciously want (unless we do the kind of deep solve work addressed in this book), but we always get what we unconsciously want.

take a look at what you currently have in your life and know that that's exactly what your unconscious wants, because what your unconscious wants, it gets.

desire-curiosities in the unconscious have much, much more power to become manifest in material reality than our conscious, “good,” ego-approved desires do.

unity within your own being, your thoughts, your emotion, and your will.

Unifie attitude of self

unio mentalis is a being that is not in conflict with itself; it's undivided and thus is extremely powerful.

The higher Self that we are is unconscious in most human beings and so, as we've mentioned, it speaks mostly in dreams and through the manifestation of events (i.e. “synchronicities”).

we all seem to have a strong interest in experiencing ourselves as separate, alienated egos, little isolated particles who exist at the mercy of cruel fate and outside circumstance.

To maintain this fictional sense of separation, the ego-personality that we take ourselves to be harshly judges, disowns, and denies huuuuuuge parts of our actual being, thus rendering them “unconscious” and creating the personal and collective shadow.

we have to greatly humble our ego's denial and fictional (if we were feeling feisty we might even say delusional) sorting of all experience into “good” (what appears to benefit me) and “bad” (what appears to not benefit me).

you perpetually generate circumstances, relationships, and synchronicities that mirror and affirm and elaborate your identification.

If you want to know who you unconsciously believe you are, just take a look at your life, your surroundings, your relationship. Your life mirrors those deep beliefs.

You are capable; you are not “at fault” or “to blame.”

You are not who you think you are. Whoever you happen to think you are, I assure you, you are not that. I suggest that you remind yourself of this often, because it makes this work easier. When you brush your teeth in the morning, think to yourself, “I'm not at all who I imagine myself to be. I'm something entirely different and far more vast and strange. Hmmmm. I wonder what I really am?” Who you think you are is largely a societally constructed fiction held together by some compulsively repetitive thoughts and stories, and it bears little or no resemblance to the being that you actually are. As

“Magic is indeed all in your head, but your head is a hell of a lot bigger than you think it is.”

the super-power of the spirit is total approval, total embrace, total celebration, the total perception of the already-existing perfection of life.

That experience of total approval and total embrace, total absence of shame or aversion, is what the spirit is always trying to teach us about and it's ironically what our conscious mind mistranslates as all those “shoulds” and judgments.

take all the embracing-approval-seeking-inherent-perfection-perceiving power of your spirit, tell your ego “thanks but you can shut the fuck up for a while,” and send all that embracing-approval-seeking-inherent-perfection-perceiving down to your actual life, body, emotions, and present situation.

agree fully to be who you already are, however messy or stinky that may be—with no reservation, no hold-back, no “if-only,” no judgment, no shame.

once you fully commit to being who you already are, having what you already have, and hugely celebrating it, you become a masterful practical magician, a force of nature capable of shifting circumstances very easily.

synchronicities or “meaningful coincidences” are perpetually happening: there's always a perfect, poetic rhyming mirror relationship between who you most deeply know yourself to be and what you externally experience.

when you do the uncomfortable work of making these strong, unconscious desire-curiosities conscious, by giving them a vast, taboo-level of approval, they lose their fateful power to fuck with you.

the more you shame something the more unconscious it will become!)

The brutal circumstances wrought by the collective are made up of unconscious individuals, so the more aware you personally become as an individual, the more you “clean up” your own influence on the collective.