The Shadow Effect: Illuminating the Hidden Power of Your True Self Through Comprehensive and Practical Shadow Work

by Deepak Chopra

As soon as you talk about “winning,” you have lost already. You have been dragged into the duality of good and evil. Once that happens, nothing can end the duality. Good has no power to defeat its opposite once and for all.

It took the discovery of so-called messenger molecules to show that the brain translates every emotion into a chemical equivalent. As messenger molecules stream through the blood, circulating to hundreds of billions of cells, unhappiness or happiness gets transmitted to the heart, liver, intestines, and kidneys.

A new field of sociology is studying “social contagion,” a deeply mysterious phenomenon that could change everything we think about our behavior.

Projection is very effective. A false state of self-acceptance is created based on “I’m okay, but you aren’t.” Yet true self-acceptance extends to other people; when you are okay with yourself, there’s no reason to label anyone as not okay.

Everyone’s behavior affects everyone else. There is no part of the planet that can be isolated, as if immune to ecological harm done by other parts. Wholeness changes our entire perspective.

At the ego level we constantly fool ourselves into thinking that being absolutely good is possible. Never again will we lie, cheat, feel jealous, lose our temper, or give in to anxiety. This intention never works out, because being good all the time is as rigid as being anything else all the time. There are moments when it’s absolutely right and healthy to get angry or be afraid. The flaw in positive thinking is that you can’t be positive all the time. It’s sane to fight against dictators, oppose oppression in all its forms, tell corrupt power brokers that they are wrong, and on and on. Life presents challenges from the dark side. We don’t have to demonize the shadow; it’s the source of almost every challenge worth facing.

The ideal is that the forces of truth, goodness, beauty, and harmony stay a step ahead of the dark forces.

The fog of illusion creates fear. Remove the fear, and what remains is love.

Perhaps you were taught meditation as a form of relaxation or stress release or as a route to silence. These are all real results, but they aim too far short. The most profound effect of meditation is to transform your awareness. If you aren’t expanding in consciousness, the true purpose of going inward has been missed.

You don’t want to turn meditation into another kind of conditioning, where your mind convinces itself that it is peaceful or has found silence when both are just pleasant moods or habits.

(In his typically blunt way, Krishnamurti warned that the worst thing a spiritual path can do is deliver what you expect. Instead of reaching the truth, the path has simply turned you into a version of your old self, but “improved” by feeling and looking better.)

Rather than being who we really are, we become a characterization of the person we think we “should” be.

We must challenge ourselves to accept all the faces of our humanity; otherwise the characters that got booted off stage and are now repressed will become the silent orchestrators of our secret life.

If a religious person hates, God is not present. If an atheist loves, then there He is.