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 your unconscious, conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it Fate.” In other words, the emotions and desires and positions that our ego disowns inevitably haunt us (personally and collectively) by generating painful synchronous experiences that urge us to confront and reintegrate the disdained side of a polarity. This is what Jung's predecessor, Sigmund Freud, called “the return of the repressed.” Polarities include all sets of “opposites”—masculine and feminine, fire and ice, night and day, violence and healing, creation and destruction, good and evil, fulfillment and deprivation, power and powerlessness, etc. Let me give you an example: most of us have grown up in a society that exalts wealth, and we have disowned and denied the other side of the polarity: a love of scarcity. In doing so we make our love of scarcity unconscious, and thus scarcity synchronously shows up in our lives, until we agree to consciously, deliberately, “insanely,” shamelessly love it. The Great Work involves making the unconscious, conscious and thus changing the locus of our agency and taking charge of our own fate. To change the locus of your agency means to stop aligning yourself with your ego's one-sided choices (the ego tends to want only what it labels “the good stuff”) and to instead align yourself with the kinkier, more adventurous choices of the underlying total divine presence that we all are: the strange, vast Self which enjoys and is very curious about abso...