Once people hear about the shadow, the dark side of human nature, almost no one denies that it exists. Every life has been touched by anger and fear. The evening news exposes human nature at its worst, week after week, without letup. If we are honest with ourselves, dark impulses are free to roam our minds at will, and the price we pay for being a good person—something we all aspire to—is that the bad person who might ruin everything must be kept under wraps.
Having a shadow side seems to call for some kind of intervention, maybe therapy or a pill, maybe a trip to the confessional or a midnight soul confrontation. As soon as people acknowledge that they have it, they want to be rid of it. There are many aspects of life in which a can-do, let’s-fix-it attitude works. Unfortunately, the shadow isn’t one of them. The reason that the shadow hasn’t been fixed for thousands of years—the whole time that human beings have been conscious of their dark side—is totally mysterious. It only makes sense to unravel the mystery before asking how to deal with it. Therefore, I’ve divided Part I into three sections, in which I fall back on a physician’s instinct to find a diagnosis, offer a cure, and then honestly tell patients their prognosis for the future:
The Fog of Illusion
The Way Out
A New Reality, a New Power
The first section (the diagnosis) describes how the shadow came to be. I differ from some in believing that the shadow is a human creation, not a cosmic force or a universal curse. The second section (the cure) deals with how you can diminish the shadow’s hidden power over you in everyday life. The third section (the prognosis) unfolds a future in which the shadow has been dismantled, not only for certain individuals, but for all of us. Together we created the shadow that now haunts us. Despite our fear and reluctance to face this fact, it turns out to be the key to transformation. If you and I weren’t part of the problem, we would have no hope of being part of the solution.
THE FOG OF ILLUSION
If you cannot see your own shadow, you must go in search of it. The shadow hides in shame in the dark alleys, secret passages, and ghost-filled attics of your consciousness. To have a shadow is not to be flawed, but to be complete. That’s a hard truth to confront. (Haven’t you tried to tell people a candid truth about themselves, only to have them snap back, “Don’t psychoanalyze me,” or something of the sort? The unconscious realm feels as dangerous as the depths of the ocean; both are dark and full of unseen monsters.) We are all living with the wreckage of failed ideals that once seemed like perfect solutions. Each solution matches a picture of what the dark side is all about.
If you think that shadow aspects like fear, anger, anxiety, and violence are the result of demonic possession, the solution is to purify the afflicted person. Demons can be driven out with rituals, cleansing of the body, fasting, and grueling austerities. This is not a primitive notion. Millions of modern people hold fast to it. You can’t pass a newsstand without seeing a glossy magazine that promises a new you through some kind of purification, whether it’s a diet that will overcome your craving for bad foods or a checklist for finding the right spouse by avoiding the wrong types of people. “Clean up your act” is the modern version of purifying from demons.
Akin to this explanation is the notion that cosmic evil has been loosed in the world. If this is your explanation for the shadow, the natural solution is religion. Religion aligns you with cosmic good in its battle against cosmic evil. For millions of people this war is very real. It extends to every aspect of their lives, from sexual temptation to abortion, the rise of godless atheism, and the decline of patriotism. The Devil creates every form of human suffering and wrong-doing. Only God (or the gods) has the power to defeat Satan and redeem us from sin. Yet it’s hard to settle whether religion defeats the shadow or actually makes it stronger by arousing strong feelings of sinfulness and guilt, shame and fear about the tortures of a hellish hereafter.
Since we pride ourselves on living in an age when superstition no longer rules our lives, these time-honored explanations of the dark side are no longer the only choices. People can turn their backs on cosmic evil and take personal responsibility. The dark side has been updated as sickness, a branch of mental health. Along this path lies a huge array of treatments. Addicts are sent into recovery programs. The anxious and depressed are sent to psychiatrists. Out-of-control rage-aholics wind up in anger-management classes after ramming a car on the freeway when they can’t control themselves.
Given all these explanations, each of which leads to a definite solution, why is the shadow undefeated?
This may seem like a gloomy prospect, but in fact the first step toward dealing with the shadow is to acknowledge its power. Human nature includes a self-destructive side. When Swiss psychologist Carl Jung posited the archetype of the shadow, he said that it creates a fog of illusion that surrounds the self. Trapped in this fog, we evade our own darkness, and thus we give the shadow more and more power over us. It’s no secret that the Jungian approach to archetypes quickly turns very intellectual and complicated. But the stubborn power of the shadow isn’t complex at all. I flicked on the television while taking a break from writing this paragraph. The famous billionaire Warren Buffett was being interviewed about booms and busts in the economic cycle.
“Do you think there will be another bubble leading to a huge recession?” the interviewer asked.
“I can guarantee it,” Buffett replied.
The interviewer shook his head. “Why can’t we learn the lessons of the last recession? Look where greed has gotten us.”
Buffett gave a small mysterious smile. “Greed is fun for a while.
People can’t resist it. However far human beings have come, we haven’t grown emotionally at all. We remain the same.”
In capsule form, there’s the shadow and the problems it poses. In the fog of illusion, we don’t see our worst impulses as self-destructive. They’re irresistible, even fun. Hence the enormous popularity of revenge dramas as entertainment, whether in Shakespeare’s theater or a spaghetti Western on the silver screen. What could be better than unleashing all our hidden rage, demolishing the enemy, and walking tall in triumph? The shadow exerts its power by making the darkness seem like the light.
The world’s wisdom traditions have spent most of their energy and thought meeting the same primal dilemmas. Creation has a dark side. Destruction is inherent in nature. Death interrupts life. Decay saps vitality. Evil is attractive. No wonder the fog of illusion eventually seems like a nice place to be. If you face reality head-on, the dark side is too overwhelming to bear. Yet there is a counterforce that has steadily—and successfully—overcome the dark side. The wreckage of failed solutions keeps us from seeing it. The fog of illusion insulates us from it. You would never guess, dialing past the disasters and horrors of nightly television, that human beings have always had the power to find peace, exaltation, and freedom from darkness.
The secret lies in the word “consciousness.” When people hear this, a look of disappointment crosses their faces. Consciousness is old hat. We’ve heard about consciousness-raising ever since feminism appeared, along with other varieties of liberation. Higher consciousness is held out as a promise by countless spiritual movements. You might even be tempted to throw consciousness onto the pile of wrecked ideals, because in the face of sincere attempts to raise our consciousness, the shadow plagues the world with war, crime, and violence, just as it plagues individual lives with pain and fear.
We have come to a crossroads. Either consciousness belongs with the other false answers, or it hasn’t been tried in the right way. I’d like to suggest that the latter is true. Higher consciousness is the answer—the only lasting answer—to the dark side of human nature. It’s not the answer that’s at fault here—it’s the application. There are countless paths to healing the soul, just as there are countless alternative treatments for cancer. But no one has enough time and energy to experiment with all of them. It’s vital to pick a path that takes you where you want to go. For that to happen, a much deeper analysis of the shadow is required. If you approach the darkness superficially, it will always persist, because the shadow isn’t as simple an enemy as sickness, a demon, or a cosmic devil. It’s an aspect of reality so basic to creation that only complete understanding can successfully confront it.
The Truth of One Reality
The first step in defeating the shadow is to abandon all notions of defeating it. The dark side of human nature thrives on war, struggle, and conflict. 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. I know that this is hard to accept. In each of our lives there are past actions we are ashamed of and present impulses we fight against. All around us are acts of unspeakable violence. War and crime devastate whole societies. People desperately pray to a higher power that can restore light where darkness prevails.
Realists long ago gave up hope of seeing the good side of human nature overcome the bad. The life of Sigmund Freud, one of the most realistic thinkers who ever confronted the psyche, came to a close as the raging violence of Nazism devoured Europe. He had concluded that civilization exists at a tragic cost. We must repress our wild, atavistic instincts in order to keep them in check, and yet despite our best efforts there will be many defeats. The world erupts in mass violence; individuals erupt in personal violence. This analysis implies a terrible kind of resignation. The “good me” has no chance of living a peaceful, loving, orderly life unless the “bad me” is shoved down into the darkness and caged in solitary confinement.
Realists will concede that repression itself is an evil. If you try to smother your feelings of anger, fear, insecurity, jealousy, and sexuality, the shadow gains more energy for its own use. And that use is ruthless. When the dark side turns on you, havoc reigns.
Last week I had a call from a woman who was desperately seeking a place of shelter and safety. Her abusive husband was a chronic alcoholic. They had been dealing with the problem for years. After periods of sobriety he would relapse and go on long benders that disrupted work and family, leaving him exhausted and ashamed when they came to an end. He had recently disappeared for a week, and this time when he came back all his remorse and contrition fell on deaf ears. His wife wanted out. The husband’s reaction was to turn violent. He struck her, which she said had never happened before. Now in addition to all her frustration and tears she was afraid for her own safety.
In the short run, all one can do is hand out the best advice about shelters and women’s support groups. But as I hung up, feeling in myself the residue of her shattered emotions, I thought about the long run. Addicts who relapse have become a standard feature of the psychological landscape. But what do they really represent? I think they are an extreme example of a common situation: a divided self. For addicts, the separation between the “good me” and the “bad me” cannot be resolved. Normally, the tactics for dealing with one’s dark side come rather easily. It’s not hard to deny your bad deeds, forget your wicked impulses, apologize for getting angry, and show contrition for your misdeeds. Addicts cannot settle for these easy prescriptions. Their darker impulses preoccupy them without the normal checks and restraints. Even access to simple pleasure is denied. The demons inside undermine pleasure and spoil it; they mock happiness; they remind addicts repeatedly of their weakness and badness.
Let’s say that this description is roughly correct. I have left out some important ingredients. Habit plays a strong part in addiction. So do physical changes in the brain—substance abusers have attacked the receptors in the brain using alien chemicals that in time destroy the normal responses of pleasure and pain. Yet these physical aspects of addiction have been grossly overstated. If addiction was primarily physical, then millions of people wouldn’t be casually using alcohol and drugs. Yet they do, with relatively little long-term harm and minimal chance of addiction. Without entering the heated controversy over addiction and its causes, one can step back and see it not as an isolated problem, but as yet another expression of the shadow.
Therefore, to treat addictions, we must approach the shadow and disarm it. Since all of us want to do just that, let me stay with the drunken husband returning from a weeklong bender. He will stand in for other expressions of the shadow, such as a violent temper, racial prejudice, sexual chauvinism, and much more. These may not seem to be related at first glance. A boss who practices sexual harassment isn’t displaying the same out-of-control behavior of a gay basher committing a hate crime. Yet the shadow provides a common link. Whenever any aspect of the self has been split off, labeled as bad, illicit, shameful, guilty, or wrong, the shadow gains power. It doesn’t matter whether the dark side of human nature expresses itself in utmost violence or in mild, socially tolerated ways. The essential fact is that a part of the self has been split off.
Once split off, the fragment that is “bad” loses touch with the central core of the self, the part we consider “good” because of its seeming lack of violence, anger, and fear. This is the adult self, the ego that has adapted well to the world and other people. The drunken husband has a good self, of course. He could have a much nicer and more acceptable good self than normal. The more you repress your dark side, the easier it is to construct a persona that shines with goodness and light. (Hence the repeated surprise of neighbors who tell the TV crews, in the aftermath of a mass shooting spree or other hideous crime, that the perpetrator “seemed like such a nice man.”)
I knew from talking to the distraught wife that her husband had been in and out of rehab. Sometimes the treatment worked for a while. But even during his sober periods, the man was miserable. He was constantly on guard lest the monkey jump on his back again. He feared his next relapse, yet as hard as he fought against it, the prospect was inevitable. Even during a time of temporary victory, the shadow had only to watch and wait.
One time when her husband was in the throes of the DTs, his night sweats and delirium became unbearable. The wife fled to a doctor, begging for a drug that would quell his symptoms. But she happened to hit upon a doctor who was a stubborn realist, and he refused. “Let him hit rock bottom,” he said. “That’s his only real hope. Short of that, you won’t be helping him by making this less painful.”
You and I might think of this as callous advice. But the phenomenon of hitting rock bottom is well known in addiction circles. It can pose a terrible risk, because when the shadow’s bluff is called, it resorts to extremes of self-destruction. There is no practical limit to how much suffering the unconscious can create, and we are all fragile. Addicts—or any in the grip of shadow energies—are trapped in a fog of illusion. Inside that fog, nothing exists but craving and the terror of not getting a fix.
When the perilous journey of hitting rock bottom works, the reason is that this fog clears. The addict begins to have thoughts that are actually realistic: “I am more than my addiction. I don’t want to lose everything. Fear can be overcome. It’s time for this to end.” In such moments of clarity, the power of healing comes from the clarity itself. The person smashes through the allure of self-destruction and sees how irrational it is. In clarity the self comes together and sees itself without blinders.
You have only one self. It is the real you. It is beyond good and evil.
The shadow loses its power when consciousness stops being divided. When you are no longer split, there’s nothing to see but one self in all directions. There are no hidden compartments, dungeons, torture cells, or mossy rocks to hide under. Consciousness sees itself. That is its most basic function, but, as we will discover, from this simple function a new self and eventually a new world can be born.
The Collective Shadow
Jung’s naming of the shadow wasn’t his major achievement; neither was his theory of archetypes. His major achievement was to show that human beings share a self. “Who am I?” depends on “Who are we?” Human beings are the only creatures who can create a self. In fact, we must create one, because the self gives us a point of view, a unique focus on the world. Without a self, our brains would be bombarded with a bewildering flood of sensory images that would not make sense. Infants lack a self and spend the first three years creating it, fashioning their personalities and preferences, temperaments and interests. Every mother can testify that the time her baby spends as a blank slate is minimal, if it exists at all. We enter the world not as passive receivers of sense data, but as eager creators. Once you become a single self with needs, beliefs, impulses, drives, wishes, dreams, and fears, suddenly the world makes sense. “I, me, and mine” exists for one purpose, to give you a personal stake in the world.
We all have a self, and we go to great lengths to defend its right to exist. But our creation is fragile. We have all experienced personal crises, such as the sudden death of a loved one or the discovery that we are seriously ill. Any crisis that attacks our sense of well-being also attacks our sense of self. If you lose your house or all your money or your spouse, this external event sends tremors of fear and doubt throughout the self. At any moment when you feel that your world is falling apart, what is really falling apart is the self and its confidence that it understands reality. After any major trauma to body or mind, it takes time for the fragile ego-personality to recover. (We are very lucky that an old adage is true: “Souls don’t break; they bounce.”)
Because we don’t know how we created the self that we cling to so desperately, the self can surprise and amaze us. Freud sprang a major surprise when he said that the self has a hidden dimension filled with drives and desires that we hardly recognize. After becoming Freud’s most prominent disciple, Jung realized that his mentor had made a mistake. The unconscious isn’t about me. It’s about us. When a person has unconscious impulses and drives, they come from the entire history of humankind. Each of us, according to Jung, is linked to a “collective unconscious,” as he called it. The notion that you and I created our separate, isolated selves is an illusion. We tapped into the vast reservoir of all human aspirations, drives, and myths. This shared unconscious is also where the shadow lives.
Some people are social, others asocial, but no one can stand outside the collective self. “We” is a constant reminder that no man is an island. Jung peeled away the social surface to expose the hidden dimension of “we.” Calling this realm the collective unconscious made it sound more technical, perhaps, but the self you and I share with everyone else is basic to our survival. Think of the ways you fall back on the collective self. Here are just a few:
When you need the support of your family and closest friends
When you join a political party
When you volunteer for a charity or a community
When you choose to fight for your country or otherwise defend it
When you identify with your nationality
When you think in terms of “us versus them”
When a disaster somewhere else affects you personally
When you are gripped by collective fear
It’s a fantasy to believe that you can opt out of “we,” even though all of us try to. We want to be seen as Americans but not the Ugly American. We sympathize with other ethnic groups but also feel different, separate, and usually better. In a crisis we want our families as close as possible, yet on other occasions we insist on being individuals with a life outside the family. The coalition between “I” and “we” is an uneasy one.
Jung made it even more uneasy. When it comes to the collective shadow, people struggle to opt out. (Society will never stop moving in ways we disapprove of.) But this is actually harder than opting out of a family role; indeed, the family is only the first unit or level of the collective self, the one we tend to see fairly easily. At Thanksgiving you can announce that you’ve changed, that you don’t deserve to be treated like a spoiled five-year-old or rebellious teenager. You may not feel that you are being heard. Your family may have too much invested in keeping you inside your old box. Society, however, is even harsher and less understanding.
Society has its invisible hooks in all of us. You can become a pacifist in times of war. That’s an individual choice. Yet it doesn’t automatically extract you from the collective shadow, where war is born out of rage, prejudice, resentment, old grievances, and the dark underbelly of nationalism. Perhaps the discredited term of “racial memory” is viable, even though it makes us feel extremely uncomfortable. Yet millions of people aren’t uncomfortable making statements like “a typical male response” or “women drivers.” Gender has turned into a hotly contested allegiance. The collective unconscious has you entangled at this moment. On the surface Citizen X may be wildly opposed to Citizen Y, but at the unconscious level they are conjoined, like the two ends of a tug-of-war.
The choice to opt in or opt out becomes the central issue of the collective shadow. It gives rise to many questions in everyday life:
What is my social obligation?
What is my patriotic duty?
How much should I conform to or resist society?
How connected am I to other people?
What do I owe to the less fortunate?
Can I change the world?
Asking any of these questions, your conscious mind cannot give the whole answer—or even the truest answer. Beneath the surface, the collective unconscious is roiling with drives, prejudices, frustrated desires, fears, and memories that are part of you because “we” is your identity as much as “I.”
Where’s the Proof?
For a long time the concept of the collective unconscious remained an intriguing theory without much proof. No one disputed that human nature has a dark side, but was Jung’s explanation actually useful or was it just a brilliant intellectual invention? Only recently have bits and pieces of proof been gathered, and, if anything, they deepen the mystery. For example, it has been known for decades that when a person becomes lonely and isolated, as often happens to widows in old age, the risk of disease and death rises compared to that for people who have strong social connections. A happy marriage makes you healthy. At first this finding was hard to accept, because medical researchers saw no link between a mental state and the body. How could the heart or a precancerous cell somewhere in the body know how a person feels? 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.
Suddenly mind-body medicine had a “real” basis, because nothing is more real than chemicals. But Jung was proposing that unhappiness or happiness could be shared by whole groups of people. Why does mass violence break out in Iraq or Rwanda? We can find explanations in long-standing tribal feuds and sectarian rifts. Are these stored in the collective unconscious, or do generations of parents tell their children to keep these ancestral grudges alive? It does no good to shake our heads and mutter about uncivilized, barbaric behavior. The greatest bloodbaths in history occurred during the two world wars. Millions of civilized soldiers marched into the jaws of death, men who wrote poetry, played the piano, knew Greek and Latin. Afterward, Europe looked back and called this slaughter insane, but eminently sane people ran the war and died in it, and when conscientious objectors protested, they were jailed or punished by being sent to the front lines as medics, a tragic irony that killed many of the people who hated war the most and wanted to prevent it.
The unconscious has a goal, which is to keep us unconscious. Sometimes knowledge peeks out anyway. In a famous social experiment at Stanford, psychologists replicated prison conditions to try to understand how guards treat prisoners. Undergraduates were divided into two groups, convicts and guards, and told to role-play any way they wanted. The psychologists in charge expected to be able to see marked changes in the behavior of each group, and yet the experiment had to be cut off in a matter of days. The students playing the part of guards began to severely mistreat the prisoners, to the point where humiliation and sexually charged abuse appeared. This stunning misfire gave rise to the theory of “good apples in bad barrels.”
The old way of thinking had told psychologists that a bad apple can force a group to misbehave. Common sense says that a gang leader can induce his passive followers to commit crimes; college hazing goes too far because a small core of bad apples puts peer pressure on others. Yet the Stanford prison experiment told the opposite story. All the participants were good kids studying at a prestige university. Their misbehavior didn’t occur because they were bad apples, but because they were in bad conditions that allowed dark forces to emerge. What the psychologists were seeing was nothing less than an incubator for the shadow, and the conditions that give rise to group violence were catalogued.
The shadow can emerge when there is complete anonymity, as often happens when, instead of being individuals, people become faces in a crowd. This loss of individuality increases if there are no consequences of one’s bad actions. The absence of law and order amplifies the effect, as does being given permission to behave beyond normal morality. If authority figures are present to actively incite bad behavior and promise a lack of punishment, the shadow surfaces all the more easily. We don’t have to make the barrel even worse by adding poverty, illiteracy, and old tribal ties, but they obviously taint conditions even more. So does any kind of “us versus them” thinking.
When I say that the shadow can emerge, I mean any kind of mass pathology can appear. The Stanford prison experiment resurfaced to explain the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq war. But if we realized that ghettos are also examples of “bad barrels” in which there are “good apples,” we wouldn’t resort to thinking of the underclass as morally inferior, or worse. The destruction of the ecosystem is a form of violence against the planet, yet it too involves good people doing very bad things because they have been given permission to and they face no punishment (except for the long-term harm that we all face, which can be ignored, denied, or put off until tomorrow). When people wake up from their misbehavior, they seem dazed and confused. The violence they perpetrated seems like a dream, even though they actively participated in horrors like war and genocide. The shadow traps us, therefore, in two ways. It keeps us unconscious and then erupts with incredible power whenever it wants to.
You may say, “What does this have to do with me?” Most of us haven’t participated in an outbreak of the shadow like what occurred at Abu Ghraib. Instead of empathizing with the soldiers who abused their charges, we look for scapegoats to punish, because the bad-apple explanation is easier to live with. Yet when you do something as innocent as drive your car, you are putting nineteen pounds of carbon dioxide into the air, a greenhouse gas that is imperiling the planet. As a society we could rectify this bad behavior in a few years, once we put our minds to it. The solutions, from cleaner cars to mass transportation to alternative fuels, already exist. Why don’t we exploit them fully? Because remaining unconscious is easier.
Skeptics have a right to point out that all of this still doesn’t prove that there is a collective unconscious. Where is the evidence that members of a society are invisibly linked, without words or peer pressure binding them? A new field of sociology is studying “social contagion,” a deeply mysterious phenomenon that could change everything we think about our behavior. We all experience how fads and trends work. Out of the blue, everybody seems to be doing something new, whether it’s texting, fleeing MySpace for Twitter, or playing a new video game. Fads are contagious behavior. You catch them from other people. Yet no one knows how behavior goes viral. What makes a group of people all decide to act the same way?
This becomes a crucial medical question if you want a group to stop doing something harmful—if you want to persuade young people not to smoke, for example, or the general population to stop getting obese. The most advanced work on this question has come from two researchers at Harvard, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, whose new book, Connected, was previewed in a recent New York Times Sunday magazine article. Christakis and Fowler analyzed data from the nation’s biggest heart study, which has followed three generations of citizens in Framingham, Massachusetts. They looked into the behavior of over five thousand people who were mapped according to fifty-one thousand social connections with family, friends, and coworkers.
Their first discovery was that when one person gained weight, started smoking, or got sick, close family members and friends were around 50 percent more likely to behave the same way. This reinforces a social-science principle that is decades old: behavior runs in groups. We have all experienced it as peer pressure or by observing behavioral traits that seem to “run in families.” The reverse is also true. If you run with a healthy crowd, you are more likely to adopt healthy behavior yourself. Not just health is involved; almost any behavior can be contagious. In a dorm at college, if you happen to room with someone with good study habits and high grades, your grades are likely to improve by association.
But the second finding from Christakis and Fowler was far more mysterious. They found that social connections can skip a link. If person A is obese and knows person B, who isn’t, a friend of person B is still 20 percent more likely to be obese, and a friend of that friend is 10 percent more likely. This “three degrees of connection” holds good for all kinds of behavior. A friend of a friend can make you prone to smoking, unhappiness, or loneliness. The statistics are there to prove it, even though you have never met this friend of a friend.
The findings of Christakis and Fowler suggest invisible connectors that run through a whole society. If their research holds up, think about the implications. The notion of a collective unconscious was posed almost a century ago by Jung. Did Jung hit on invisible connectors long before data came along to support them? That’s really a side question to the main one: What kind of connections can exist invisibly, without people talking to each other, watching each other’s behavior, or even knowing about each other’s existence?
These are complex issues, and I’m giving only a hint of how mysterious they are. But the new research on social contagion is exciting, because it supports the notion that there is actually one mind that coordinates not just how people catch on to fads or decide to imitate each other, not just how distant brain cells know what other brain cells are doing, but far-flung phenomena like how twins separated by thousands of miles suddenly know what’s happening to each other. These invisible connectors are bringing the collective unconscious into many, many areas of life. Social contagion is making news because we all like to rely on data, but the possibility that we all participate in one mind challenges religion, philosophy, and the meaning of life itself.
The shadow, then, is a shared project. Anyone can have a hand in building it. All you need is the ability to remain unconscious. Countless fear-mongers believe they are doing good. Every defender of the homeland expects to be honored and praised. Tribes warring against other tribes deeply believe that they must struggle in order to survive. We resist our shadow and deny its existence because of past indoctrination and the hypnosis of social conditioning. Childhood experiences cause unending later reminders that “this is good, this is bad; this is divine, this is diabolical.” Such indoctrination is the way all societies are structured. What we overlook is that we are creating a shared self at the same time. If children were taught to become aware of their shadow, sharing even dark feelings, forgiving themselves for not being “good” all the time, learning how to release shadow impulses through healthy outlets, then there would be much less damage to society and the ecosystem.
Creators of the Shadow
Even if you haven’t paid a moment’s attention to Freud or Jung, you have inherited a different self because of them. They made it impossible to think about human nature as something other than a deep mystery. Like the tip of an iceberg, only a fraction of who you are is visible in the physical world. Unseen and often ignored, the human soul is a place of ambiguity, of contradiction and paradox. And that’s as it should be, because all experience in life, which is the manifestation of the soul, is the result of contrast. You have no experience in the absence of contrast: light and shadow; pleasure and pain; up and down; backward and forward; hot and cold. If you didn’t have these divisions, there would be no manifestation. Consciousness would be one vast flat field, like a desert. You would be aware of everything, but nothing in particular.
In order to have manifestation, you need opposing energies. That is why explicit enemies are also implicit allies. For example, Osama bin Laden and George Bush cocreated each other. On the surface they were enemies, but underneath they were allies. It’s a general principle. You need your enemies to be who you are. Jung had the courage to see that each of us needs a dark side to be who we are. In fact, the collective unconscious is how the human race evolved, by passing on every new discovery in invisible form. These are primarily discoveries about the self.
It’s a basic fact of physical anthropology that in Homo sapiens a massive part of the brain, the cortex, is devoted to higher functions. The cortex allows us to reason; it gave rise to love and compassion. Religion was born in the cortex, along with our concepts of heaven and hell. Without the higher brain, we would never have developed reading and writing, mathematics and art.
What a shock, then, to dig up the remains of Neanderthals, only to find that not only did that species have a huge cortex, but it was slightly bigger than ours. Yet Neanderthals roamed Europe hunting large animals for four hundred thousand years—twice as long as Homo sapiens has been around—using only one tool: a heavy spear with a stone point tied to it. Despite their huge cortex, Neanderthals never discovered a second tool. They didn’t even progress to a lighter spear they could throw. Instead, they used their heavy spears to attack their prey, such as woolly mammoths and giant cave lions, at close quarters, thrusting the stone point into the animal’s side. As a result, almost every male Neanderthal skeleton exhibits multiple fractures. Those big animals fought back, and yet for almost half a million years the Neanderthal brain couldn’t figure out that it would be much safer to make lighter weapons that could be thrown from a distance.
The evolution of human beings depended not on the physical brain, but on the mind that used it. In the domain of the unconscious, learning was taking place, silently and out of sight. Homo sapiens was able to use the brain for much more complex things than any of its ancestors. Once the mind figured out how to make better weapons, life became easier. Farming replaced hunting and gathering. As life became more complicated, language arose so that people could exchange ideas.
In other words, Jung hit upon a secret place where all the action was. The collective unconscious is the mind’s library, a storehouse of all past experience that we, in the present moment, can draw upon. The question “Who am I” never has a fixed answer. The self is fluid and constantly changing, meaning your own self and the self you share with everyone else. Studies have shown, for example, that the brains of people who have mastered computer skills and video games have new neural pathways unknown in the brains of people who are “digitally naïve,” as the saying goes.
If we want to find the true self, we must dive into the shadow world and its constant flux. This has seemed like a dangerous quest, one that would cause all but the most heroic to turn pale. At the beginning of his famous film Hamlet, Laurence Olivier placed these words: “This is the story of a man who couldn’t make up his mind.” Hamlet has proof that his uncle killed his father in order to gain the crown of Denmark. He has every reason to seek revenge, and yet he can’t. The perilous journey into the shadow, where killing and revenge are normal, threatens Hamlet’s very existence, his nobility and civilized breeding. Even so, the prince does accept the perilous journey, and it leads him into disgust, self-loathing, the loss of love, and thoughts of suicide—typical reactions when you face the monsters of the deep. When he himself is finally murdered, Hamlet accepts his fate with relief and unearthly calm. The words at the beginning of Olivier’s film should have been: “This is the story of a man afraid of his own shadow.”
It’s important, therefore, to realize that the shadow is a human creation. It was forged in the collective unconscious. Hating an enemy (yesterday it was Communists; today it’s terrorists) isn’t the fault of human nature. You and I inherited the feeling of enmity. It comes from the shadow, whose contents are of human construction. Specifically, the shadow sets up the model of “them,” people who are alien from “us.” “They” want to hurt us and take away what we value. Unlike us, they aren’t fully human. We have a right to fight them, even destroy them. This invisible model, which shapes the minds of many people rather than one, which survives generation after generation to undermine rational thought, is what the shadow archetype is all about.
Human beings have consciously created vast civilizations as settings for our own evolution, yet at the unconscious level we have been amassing a history that goes far beyond the experience of any single person or epoch. What you call “me” is actually “us” to a far greater degree than you know.
The evidence can be found in your body. The immune system is a collective project. Under your breastbone lies a gland, the thymus, which produces the antibodies you need to resist infection from invading germs and viruses. When you are born, your thymus gland is undeveloped. You depend for the first year of life on immunity from your mother’s body. But the thymus begins to grow and mature until it reaches maximum size and function at age twelve, after which it shrinks. During its period of growth, the thymus gives you antibodies for the diseases that were encountered by the entire human race. You do not have to be infected by every disease; the inheritance of immunity is collective—and at the same time we keep adding to the storehouse as we confront new diseases.
This example shows that you don’t have a separate physical body. Your body participates in a collective project, a process that never ends. I could have picked other examples, such as the evolution of the brain, but they all come down to DNA. Your genes record the history of human development on the physical level. Even though genetics hasn’t revealed all the secrets of the genome, I think the next leap won’t be physical—it will take place at the level of the soul. And the first task, once we arrive there, is to renew the soul itself. The era of the shadow can come to an end once we choose unity over separation. The fate of the divided self is in our hands.
The Process Continues
Where did the shadow come from? The impulse for separation created the contrast—and the war—between light and dark. When separation goes pathological, it manifests as the shadow’s anger, fear, envy, and hostility. So the human soul feels simultaneously divine and diabolical, sacred and profane, saint and sinner. In Eastern wisdom traditions we have a saying that the sinner and the saint are merely exchanging notes. The sinner has a future and the saint has a past in which their roles are reversed. Forbidden lust and unconditional love are two sides of the same coin. You can’t have a coin without a head and a tail, or an electrical current without a positive and a negative terminal.
Like electricity, life has no juice unless one pole sends a current to the other. Once you understand this, the first thing you realize is that to have a shadow is normal. The shadow is the separation impulse. But the divine impulse is the impulse that seeks unity. The choice to create a shadow has proved irresistible. It gave us the self we see as human, a familiar “I” who can be both good and bad. There is no real mystery there. The truly mysterious self enters when we ask if the power of self-creation can be used for something new: unity in place of division.
Separation has been a fascinating trip. The ego took human beings on a wild ride through bliss and tragedy. Our soul, this place of contradiction, paradox, and ambiguity, has constantly struggled between the two impulses, divine and diabolical. We see little reason to give up one for the other. We secretly love our bad boys and bad girls. Calling someone “devil may care” is a grudging compliment.
Yet from another perspective we have been wandering in the fog of illusion. Instead of exercising our power to create any self we want, we have passively inherited a split self, with all the misery and conflict it brings with it. Once you decide that “I, me, and mine” defines who you are, the perils of separation are inescapable. You can’t have God without the Devil.
What is the Devil? It’s the mythical shadow, the fallen angel, but it was born divine. In fact, another way of interpreting the word “devil” is as “the divine not feeling well.” There’s a shocking conclusion hidden in this: you can’t have a universe if you don’t have darkness contending with the light. Contrast doesn’t sound exciting, but once it exploded into the visible universe, the result was incredibly dramatic: a living hologram of good and evil. There isn’t an atom or subatomic particle in the cosmos that hasn’t been enlisted into the drama of opposites, starting with electrical charges and ascending to the battle between Satan and God.
The visible universe gave us the scenic backdrop for our evolution; the invisible domain gave us the soul. The two go hand in hand. In fact, they are one. Any change you make at the level of the soul also creates a change in the outer world, which is the mirror of the soul. You are not stuck with inheriting the same old drama in which a fallen, sinful soul struggles to reach the light—and may or may not succeed. That spiritual drama underpins the ego’s wild ride. It turns the whole world into a playground for good and evil, and all that goes with it: sin and redemption, temptation and righteous ness. The notion of creating a new soul—and a new story line to go with it—is both strange and exciting.
The impulse for separation gave us the reality we know. What impulse will give us a new reality? Call it the holographic impulse. The holographic impulse bypasses details and aims for wholeness. It creates three-dimensional settings in which inner and outer fuse into one. Most people have seen a hologram created by using laser light. By taking no more than the fragment of a photo or an object, the laser can re-create the entire object or photo, as if by magic. Instead of a fragment, wholeness pops into view. In the same way, even though you are preoccupied by the fragments of everyday life—errands, cooking, work, leisure, likes and dislikes, a hundred small choices between A and B—your mind has actually projected a hologram for you to inhabit. You live inside a wholeness. The holographic impulse cannot be switched off or destroyed. Even though you may look around and dislike much of what you see in your personal world, feeling trapped by other people and difficult situations, you retain the power to create a totally new hologram. A new hologram implies a new self. Neither can be achieved one piece at a time. It’s easier to create wholeness, in fact, than to change your reality one fragment at a time.
To have holistic change, you must operate from the level of holistic creation. There’s a fascinating exercise that gives a hint at how this might work. Close your eyes and imagine a vivid visual experience, such as a tropical sunset or a high alpine peak. The image itself can be anything, so long as you can envision it with color and depth. Now imagine a taste you love, such as rich chocolate or coffee. Go into that sensation deeply until you actually taste it. Move on to a sound you love, such as your favorite music, then a delightful texture, like velvet, and finally an intoxicating smell, such as a damask rose or lily.
Having imagined these vivid experiences in all the five senses, open your eyes. You will be startled at what you see. The ordinary world is vividly alive. Colors are brighter. A vibrancy hangs in the air. This startling change is reported by everyone, and it demonstrates that even slightly heightening your inner world causes the outer world to automatically follow suit. What we have here is a clue to one of the deepest of spiritual secrets, the power to alter reality all at once. Such power isn’t available on the surface of life, which is why people feel tossed about by their external circumstances. You must find the level of the soul, where the holographic impulse can create anything.
Jung called it the collective unconscious rather than the collective conscious for this very reason. Human beings have collectively created the world without knowing that it was happening. Here are the main ingredients we used. Notice how they spiral deeper and deeper from the first, which seems rather harmless, to the last, which is highly self-destructive:
Secrecy: We learned not to reveal our basic drives and desires.
Guilt and shame: Once the basic drives and desires were hidden, they felt bad.
Judgment: Anything that felt bad became wrong.
Blame: We wanted to know who was responsible for the pain we felt.
Projection: A convenient scapegoat was manufactured, either a hated enemy or an invisible demonic force.
Separation: We did everything we could to push this demonic force outside ourselves. Enemies were “the other,” who had to be guarded against and fought with.
Struggle: Projection couldn’t make the pain go away permanently, so a constant state of inner-versus-outer warfare ensued.
As you can see, the shadow is still being fueled, because we are masters at manipulating these ingredients. We are addicted to them, in fact, even though the result is war, violence, crime, and endless struggle, not to mention the stifling effect of believing in cosmic evil as a presence in the world. The solution is to uncreate the shadow. It’s not Frankenstein’s monster, a horror that has grown more powerful than its creator. The shadow is a region of the psyche. Nothing exists in it that is beyond our power to dissolve. Instead of allowing the shadow to victimize us, we must seize the control switch and reclaim our true function as creators.
THE WAY OUT
Let me summarize the argument up to now in three sentences. Duality is where you are. The shadow has surrounded you with a fog of illusion. Your split self is the first and most damaging illusion. Now let’s engage the problem personally, by seeing if the diagnosis actually fits.
The shadow may be hard for you to see when you look around on this or any other day. For most of us, everyday life isn’t pathological. Even though experts tell us that domestic and sexual abuse is far more widespread than we want to admit, even though depression and anxiety disorders continue to rise at an alarming rate, ordinary people find it easy to deny the darker side of human nature. So it’s important to know that the shadow isn’t a bogeyman. Anything that keeps you unconscious is the result of the shadow, because the shadow is the hiding place of pain and stress. Mass outbreaks of violence occur when social stress cannot be suppressed any longer. Domestic violence occurs when personal stress cannot be contained. The price of remaining unconscious is very high.
Let’s make this more personal. The forces that have been employed over the ages to create the collective shadow are being used by you today. The unconscious may seem like an amorphous sea, a dark chaos of impulses, drives, secrets, and taboos all jumbled together. But we can separate out the various strands and make sense of them. Consider the following chart:
“Me and My Shadow”
Like everything in life, creating the shadow is a process. No one sets out to increase the power of the shadow, yet we all do. The shadow increases whenever you resort to the following:
Keeping secrets from yourself and others. A secretive life gives the shadow material to build upon. Forms of secrecy are denial, deliberate deception, fear of exposing who you are, and conditioning by a dysfunctional family.
Harboring guilt and shame. Everyone is fallible; no one is perfect. But if you feel ashamed of your mistakes and guilty about your imperfections, the shadow gains power.
Making yourself and others wrong. If you can’t find a way to release your guilt and shame, it’s all too easy to decide that you—or others—deserve them. Judgment is guilt wearing a moral mask to disguise its pain.
Needing someone to blame. Once you decide that your inner pain is a moral issue, you will have no trouble blaming someone else you feel is inferior to you in some way.
Ignoring your own weaknesses while criticizing those around you. This is the process of projection, which many don’t see or understand very well. But whenever you try to explain a situation as the act of God or the Devil, you are projecting. The same goes for identifying “them,” the bad people who cause all the problems. If you believe the problem is with “them,” you have projected your own fear instead of taking responsibility for it.
Separating yourself from others. If you reach the point where you feel that the world is divided into “them” and “us,” you will naturally identify your side as the good one and choose it. This isolation increases a sense of fear and suspicion, which the shadow thrives on.
Struggling to keep evil at bay. At the bottom of the cycle, people are convinced that evil lurks everywhere. What has really happened is that the creators of illusion are being fooled by their own creation. Everything has come together to give the shadow enormous power.
We’ve taken the first step in removing the shadow’s power by exposing the process that fuels it. There’s a downward spiral. It begins by thinking you have to keep secrets, and then those secrets, instead of remaining quietly hidden, become the source of shame and guilt. Self-judgment enters. This is too painful to live with, so you search for someone outside yourself to blame. The spiral leads eventually to isolation and denial. By the time you find yourself struggling with sin and evil, you have long ago lost sight of the basic fact that would save you, which isn’t redemption from the Devil. The basic fact is that you entered this whole process willingly by making simple choices. Therefore to escape you only need to make the opposite choices.
I’ve divided those choices into four categories with steps to take toward making them:
The basic life choices are available to anyone. We make the opposite choices all the time. The shadow has persuaded us to blame others rather than take responsibility. It tells us that we are unworthy of love and respect. It promotes anger and fear as natural reactions to life. All of us are entangled in these disastrous choices. They stifle our lives and remove all joy. So nothing is more urgent than to turn the process around, and the sooner the better.
Step 1: Stop Projecting
The shadow, according to Jung, tells us to ignore our own weaknesses and project them on others. To avoid feeling that we’re not good enough, we see others around us as not good enough. Countless examples come to mind. Some are trivial, while others are a matter of life and death. The latest movie starlet is criticized for losing too much weight while a whole nation becomes more obese. Antiwar movements are denounced as unpatriotic, while everyone is paying taxes to kill citizens of a country that has never done America any harm. Everyone uses projection as a defense to avoid looking inward.
Realize that this is an unconscious defense. The template of projection is the following statement: “I can’t admit what I feel, so I’ll imagine that you feel it.” Thus, if you can’t feel your own anger, you label a group in society as violent and to be feared. If you unconsciously have sexual feelings you consider taboo, such as attraction to someone of the same gender or thoughts of infidelity, you think that others are directing those feelings toward you.
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.
Are You Projecting?
Here are the typical forms that projection can take:
Superiority: “I know that I’m better than you. You should see this and acknowledge it.”
Injustice: “It’s unfair that these bad things are happening to me,” or “I don’t deserve this.”
Arrogance: “I’m too proud to bother with you. Your very presence irritates me.”
Defensiveness: “You’re attacking me, so I’m not listening to you.”
Blame: “I didn’t do anything. It’s all your fault.”
Idealizing others: “My father was like a god when I was little,” “My mother was the best in the world,” or “The man I marry will be my hero.”
Prejudice: “He’s one of them, and you know what they’re like,” or “Be careful. Their kind is dangerous.”
Jealousy: “You’re thinking of betraying me. I can see it.”
Paranoia: “They’re out to get me,” or “I see the conspiracy no one else sees.”
Whenever any of these attitudes appear, there is an unconscious feeling hidden in the shadow that you cannot face. Here are some typical examples:
Superiority disguises the feeling that you are a failure or that others would reject you if they knew who you really are.
Injustice disguises the feeling of sinfulness or the sense that you are always to blame.
Arrogance disguises bottled-up anger, and beneath that lies deep-seated pain.
Defensiveness disguises the feeling that you are unworthy and weak. Unless you defend yourself from others, you will start attacking yourself.
Blame disguises the feeling that you are at fault and should be ashamed of yourself.
Idealizing others disguises the feeling that you are a weak, helpless child who needs protection and taking care of.
Prejudice disguises the feeling that you are inferior and deserve to be rejected.
Jealousy disguises your own impulse to stray or a sense of sexual inadequacy.
Paranoia disguises deep-seated, overwhelming anxiety.
As you can see, projection is far more subtle than anyone imagines. Yet it is the open gate to the shadow. It is a painful gate, though, since what you see as faults in others masks what you feel about yourself. It would be ideal if we could stop blaming and judging all at once. In reality, undoing the shadow is always a process. To stop projecting you must see what you’re doing, contact the feeling that is hidden beneath the surface, and make peace with that feeling.
See what you’re doing: Is it easy to recognize when you’re projecting? One clue is negativity—projection is never neutral. It manifests as negative energy because what it’s disguising is negative. This turns out to be a help. You know when you’re feeling angry or anxious. Those are shadow feelings. But when you are aiming your anger at someone or something or seeing reasons everywhere to be afraid (negativity is present), you have a clear example of projection. I hope you can see the difference between feelings and projecting those feelings; feeling angry is useful, while aiming anger in the form of blame isn’t. Society wants you to keep blaming, because “us versus them” thinking is a way—a very bad way—to hold society together. Hence the small voice inside your head that wants to get “them”—the terrorists, the godless Communists, the drug dealers, criminals, or child abusers. The list is endless. Instead of buying into all the reasons for blaming “them” and judging all their faults (reasons that can be valid), take a different path. Look at yourself and what the blame game says about you.
One time the noted Indian spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti was giving a talk, and someone in the audience stood up to ask a question. “I want peace in the world. I abhor war. What can I do to bring about peace?”
“Stop being the cause of war,” Krishnamurti replied.
The questioner was taken aback. “I am not in favor of war. I only want peace.”
Krishnamurti shook his head. “Inside you is the cause of every war. It is your violence, hidden and denied, that leads to wars of every kind, whether it is war inside your home, against others in society, or between nations.”
His reply makes us uncomfortable, but I think it’s true, because the Vedic rishis (seers) proclaimed, “You are not in the world. The world is in you.” If that is so, then the violence of the world is in each of us. Before the concept of the shadow emerged, such a statement sounded mystical. But once you see that you are participating in a shared self, you can also see that every impulse of anger, fear, resentment, and aggression leads directly from you to the collective unconscious and back again.
I realize that catching yourself every time you project your own hidden negativity isn’t always easy. Denial is powerful. The shadow is secretive. When you idealize somebody else, a hero you hold up to the light and call perfect, it’s hard to see any underlying negativity. But there is, because this fantasy of perfection in someone else hides a deep sense of inferiority in yourself. But if you go back to the chart about projection and consult it often, you will find it easier to catch yourself using this defense.
Contact your hidden feelings: The minute you see that you are projecting a hidden feeling is the moment you need to contact it. Don’t delay. The door of opportunity closes very quickly. But before it does, there’s a gap. Just before you erect your defense, you actually feel the thing you don’t want to feel.
Here’s an example given to me by a young man. He was very poor in graduate school, but had prosperous friends who used to invite him to dinner. One night sitting around the table, he thought of a curious anecdote.
“Remember when we were in London last summer?” he said, turning to his host. “You and your wife started arguing right there on the sidewalk. You both raised your voices, while I just stood there. You were so busy screaming, you didn’t notice that a van had pulled up behind you. On the side of the van were the words ‘Blue Tantrum.’ I guess that’s an example of synchronicity or something.”
The other guests nodded and murmured, and the conversation moved on. But afterward the hostess took the young man aside. “Why did you want to humiliate us like that?” she asked angrily.
“I wasn’t humiliating you,” he protested. “I was telling a story that I thought was interesting.”
“Go back,” the hostess said. “Put yourself in the moment when you decided to tell the story. What did you feel?”
The young man shrugged. “Nothing. The story just came to me.”
She shook her head. “No, at that moment you had a malicious impulse. Not just any story came to mind. One that embarrassed us did.”
Not many people have the nerve, or the acumen, to analyze a fleeting moment in this way. It’s to the young man’s credit that the confrontation worked. He told me, “I didn’t automatically defend myself. I went back, and she was right. I had felt jealous at that moment. Here was a table of food and wine I couldn’t afford to buy. At a certain level, it was humiliating to be there and know I couldn’t reciprocate.” Which is why, to hide his own humiliation, he turned the situation around and told a story in which someone else was humiliated.
In this little example we see the traits you need if you want to feel what is hidden inside: alertness, willingness, openness, honesty, and courage. Or to put it another way, if you don’t stop yourself and ask, “What am I really feeling right now?” you are turning your back on alertness, willingness, openness, honesty, and courage. You are letting the shadow win.
Make peace with your feelings: Once you can feel what’s really there, you have a choice. Several choices, actually. You can push the feeling back down. You can blame yourself for not being a good person. You can attack the feeling, lament it, or apologize for it. None of these choices are productive. They play into the shadow’s hands by reinforcing the unwanted feeling and making it even more unwanted.
It sounds strange, but feelings have feelings. Being part of you, they know when they are unwanted. Fear cooperates by hiding; anger cooperates by pretending it doesn’t exist. That’s more than half the problem. How can you heal an unwanted feeling when it’s trying not to cooperate? You can’t. Until you make peace with negative feelings, they will persist. The way to deal with negativity is to acknowledge it. Nothing more is needed. No dramatic confrontation, no catharsis. Feel the feeling, whether it’s anger, fear, envy, aggression, or anything else, and say, “I see you. You belong to me.” You don’t have to feel fine about your unwanted feeling. This is a process. Anger and fear will return; so will any deeply hidden emotion. When one does, acknowledge it. As time goes on, the message will get through. Your unwanted feelings will start to feel less unwanted.
When that happens, you will begin to hear their story. Packaged inside every feeling is a tale: “I am this way for a reason.” Be open to the story that comes out, no matter what it is. Every past trauma you have ever experienced, from a car accident to rejection in love, from losing a job to failing in school, has deposited its remains in the shadow. You have been accumulating what some psychologists call “emotional debt to the past.” To pay back this debt, you listen to the story that lies behind it. Let’s say the story is “I never got over not making the baseball team” or “I feel guilty that I stole money from Mom’s purse.” Most stories are rooted in childhood, because childhood is the learning ground for guilt, shame, resentment, inferiority, and all of the most primal negativity we carry around with us.
Having heard the story, be accepting. Tell yourself that you had a valid reason for holding on to negativity. You had no choice, because it was secretly deposited and then remained hidden. Therefore, you did nothing wrong. Your old feelings stuck around to protect you from having the same wound repeated. Make peace with this now, and you have turned a negative into a positive. Fear wasn’t holding on to hurt you; it thought you needed to be on guard in case of another hurt—another girl or guy rejects you, another parent scolds you, another boss fires you. But those things aren’t going to happen again, certainly not in the very same way.
The last thing you want to do is to recycle these old emotions. That’s very tempting, of course. Caught in a frustrating situation, we’re all tempted to reach into our bag of emotions and haul out anger. At tense moments we reach in and pull out anxiety. However, if you keep recycling emotions from the past, you will only wind up reinforcing the past.
None of us need to protect ourselves from a childhood that is long past. Even if similar situations occur—not that anyone can predict them—all of us are overprotected already. We don’t store one reason to be afraid, but dozens and dozens, and just so we don’t forget them, we participate in collective fear about enemies, crime, natural disasters, and so forth. It won’t do you any harm to make peace with as much fear, anger, and aggression as you can. The psyche will still remember what it needs to.
Having learned how to deal with projection, you can ask the next question. Why do you need to defend yourself at all? This becomes a key issue, because it calls into question the main reason the shadow exists.
Step 2: Detach and Let Go
Why is it hard to let go of negative emotions? There’s more than one reason. First, negative emotions are the tip of the iceberg, so every time you get angry or anxious, for example, there is much more of those feelings stored in the shadow. Second, negativity is sticky. It holds on to us just as much as we hold on to it. This stickiness is a survival mechanism. Feelings think they have a right to exist. Like you, your emotions justify their existence. They offer reasons; they build a convincing story. Despite all these things, however, you can let go of negativity once you know how.
The process begins by acknowledging your feelings, however unwanted, and bringing them to the surface. We’ve covered that step. Now you need to detach yourself from the negativity. There’s a balancing act here, because you want to take responsibility (“This is mine”) without going overboard and identifying with your negativity (“This is me”). Negativity isn’t you once you know your true self, which is beyond the shadow. So consider any negative reaction as though it were like an allergy or the flu, something that changes your situation for the moment only. An allergy is yours, but it isn’t you. The flu brings misery, but that doesn’t mean you are doomed to be a miserable person.
When you find ways to undo the stickiness of negativity, you will become more detached. The following statements work toward detachment:
“I can get through this. It won’t last forever.”
“I’ve felt this way before. I can deal with it.”
“I won’t feel better unloading on someone else.”
“No one ever wins the blame game.”
“Acting out leads to regret and guilt.”
“I can be patient. Let’s see if I cool down in a while.”
“I’m not alone. I can call someone to help me through this bad patch.”
“I am much more than my feelings.”
“Moods come and go, even the worst moods.”
“I know how to center myself.”
If you can make any of these statements true, then you are adding to your coping skills. How do you make them true? By wanting them to be. You must intend to be detached, centered, patient, and self-aware. If you have that intention, automatically you are aligning with detachment. The opposite is to be so attached that you increase the stickiness of negativity. That occurs when you have the following kinds of thoughts:
“I feel horrible. I don’t deserve this. Why me?”
“Somebody’s going to pay. I didn’t bring this on myself.”
“Who can I unload this on?”
“This is making me crazy.”
“Nobody can help me.”
“How can I distract myself until this feeling goes away?”
“I need my drug of choice to get through this.”
“When I’m feeling this bad, everybody better look out.”
“I want to be rescued.”
“Somebody has it in for me.”
“This has to be settled right now.”
“I can’t help how I feel. It’s just how I’m wired.”
I realize that “detachment” is a term that people in the West identify with Eastern fatalism or indifference. So make this the first concept you reframe in a positive way. Detachment doesn’t show indifference. It shows that you really don’t want negativity to stick to you.
Step 3: Give Up Self-Judgment
You get the emotions you think you deserve. Yet many times these aren’t the emotions you want. Far from it. Everyone is in the position of juggling “bad” feelings with “good” ones, which comes down to self-judgment. Wrapped up in the “bad” feelings—anger, fear, envy, hostility, victimization, self-pity, and aggression—is a self-image that needs these negative emotions. No two people use them exactly alike. We build up our identities in unique ways. Some people use fear to motivate themselves to overcome challenges; others use it to feel dependent and victimized. Some deploy anger to control anyone in their vicinity; others are afraid of anger and never show it. Yet your sense of self, and therefore your self-worth, are tied up in every feeling you have.
Every emotion is valid in some way or another. But when you add the ingredient of self-judgment, any emotion can be damaging. Love has destroyed lives when it was misplaced, warped, or rejected. “I was only trying to help” sounds like a positive statement born of caring, but how often does it mask unwelcome intrusion? You can shape a nonjudgmental self-image anytime you want. Countless people want to, and almost as many experts tell us how. But if your emotions have negative effects, you won’t be able to create the self you want. It’s very difficult to feel good about yourself if primal emotions like anger and fear are allowed to have their own way. So, what to do? If repression and suppression don’t work, neither does letting negative emotions run free.
I place a high value on sympathy. If you can look at yourself and say, “It’s all right. I understand,” you are doing two things at once. You are taking the judgment out of your emotions, and you are giving yourself permission to be who you are. Sympathy is an emotion we tend to direct outward. We forget to grant it to ourselves. I was reminded of this by a striking encounter I had with a young woman who came up to ask me a question.
“I listen to people all the time,” she said. “I was just wondering, can being sympathetic go too far?”
I asked her to describe what happens when she listens to people.
“It’s strange,” she said. “When I get up in the morning I listen to my family and sympathize. I’ve been that way since I was a child. At work people bring me their troubles, because they know I will be sympathetic. But recently even people on the street, perfect strangers, suddenly come up to me to tell me their troubles. I hear all kinds of stories.”
“And you always take the time to offer sympathy?” I asked. She nodded.
“I don’t think you’re harming yourself,” I said. She looked relieved. “In fact,” I went on, “I think you are remarkable without realizing it. I’m grateful you exist.”
This was unexpected, and she was embarrassed. Not many of us can say that our main problem is an excess of sympathy for others.
“But there are pitfalls,” I told her. “Sympathy is a synonym for compassion. The word ‘compassion’ means to suffer with. That’s where one must draw the line. Your sympathy will be ill-spent if it exhausts you. It must not overwhelm you or cause you to feel as bad as the one you sympathize with,” I said.
When it’s valid, compassion is as valuable for the one who gives it as for the one who receives it. Afterward, I thought about how this applies to the self. Inside each of us is a voice that sits in judgment. Call it a conscience or the superego, this voice doesn’t come from an outside judge or parent. But it acts independent, evaluating the worth of who we are and what we’re thinking. Let’s say you get angry at someone unjustly and later feel guilty about flying off the handle. The judgmental voice in your head says, “You were wrong. You probably got yourself in trouble, and you deserve it.” Perhaps these words are helpful in a certain way. But this judgmental voice is just you; therefore, in judging against you, it is actually judging against itself. There is no independent, objective judge inside. The voice that labels you as wrong or bad is a fictional character, and what you’ll notice is that this character never sympathizes. To keep its power over you, it must intimidate you.
What would happen if you started to sympathize with yourself? The inner judge would begin to dissolve. In the case of this young woman, I sensed that she wasn’t manipulating her sympathy selfishly, as people do when they say, “After seeing how badly off my friend is, I feel much better about myself.” Instead, she was letting her sympathy flow by listening and opening a channel. We must do the same for ourselves. Even better if that channel leads to God. At its highest, compassion has a healing role to play. When you offer sympathy, the woes of another are heard and passed on to a higher level of awareness.
We’re not talking about renouncing your conscience. But when conscience becomes punishing and makes you feel unworthy, it has gone too far. It’s time to release the judgment that keeps you bound inside a narrow self-conception. In the realm of spirit or God—call it what you will—suffering can be healed. Through your sympathy, you open a channel to the healing powers. Aspire to be such a channel. It is one of life’s greatest joys, and certainly the purest.
Step 4: Rebuild Your Emotional Body
As any negative emotion surfaces, you can replace it with something new. I call this rebuilding your emotional body. We all have a mental image of what a desirable physical body is like—trim, healthy, youthful, fresh, pleasing to look at. But we don’t use those qualities with regard to our emotions, our “emotional body.” The emotional body, like the physical body, must be properly nourished. It can grow tired and flabby when the same responses to the world are repeated over and over. It becomes diseased when exposed to toxins and unhealthy influences.
Every time you feel a negative emotion, your emotional body is expressing discomfort, soreness, fatigue, or pain. Pay attention to these symptoms just as you would to physical pain and discomfort. If you had a rock in your shoe, you wouldn’t hesitate to remove it. Yet how long have you endured emotional rocks in your shoe? In many ways, our priorities should be reversed. Think of the time and money spent to avoid aging. We expend enormous effort and care to make sure that our bodies can be healthy and functional into advanced old age. Yet ironically, it’s the emotional body that is immune to aging. There is no reason for emotions ever to grow old, because the source of freshness and renewal is always at hand. Your emotional body should remain energetic, alert, flexible, and pleasing to experience. I think a single phrase, “the lightness of being,” covers all of these qualities.
Children naturally feel lightness in their being. They play and laugh; they forget traumas and bounce back quickly. Whatever they feel quickly comes to the surface. This carefree period may not last long. Observing a young child closely, you can see the beginning of tendencies that will lead to future suffering, as the shadow teaches its tactics of projection, blame, guilt, and all the rest. That’s why rebuilding the emotional body is the best long-term strategy for everyone—your future depends on undoing your past. The key is to have a vision. Then you can implement your vision every day. There’s no lack of detailed advice, in this book and from many other sources. But without a vision, even the best advice becomes haphazard and piecemeal.
A vision for rebuilding the emotional body includes at least some of the following points:
Becoming more whole
Learning to be resilient
Dispelling the demons of the past
Healing old wounds
Expecting the best and highest for yourself
Adopting realistic ideals
Giving of yourself
Being generous, especially with your spirit
Seeing through your fears
Learning self-acceptance
Communicating with God or your higher self
The most important single thing in rebuilding your emotional body is becoming more whole. Emotions can’t be reshaped in isolation. They merge and blend with thoughts, actions, aspirations, wishes, and relationships. Every feeling you have invisibly moves outward into your environment, affecting the people around you and ultimately society and the world at large. Having worked with thousands of people over the years, I’ve come to see that without wholeness, all we can create is superficial change. Therefore, let’s see if we can approach your life as one reality, a process that encompasses every thought and action you have ever had or will have.
This may sound rather overwhelming, but to escape the fog of illusion, the only way out is reality. In truth there is only one reality. You have no way of separating yourself from it. Nor would you wish to once you see the enormous advantage of living in wholeness. Your separate self, which has such a huge personal stake in the world, isn’t who you really are. In fact, it may be a total illusion, which is what the Buddha said. The self you defend every day as your unique point of view is a convenient fiction that makes the ego feel good. What the ego doesn’t realize, however, is that it would feel even better if it gave up its narrow, selfish stake in the world. When that happens, the true self can emerge. Then and only then is wholeness possible.
A NEW REALITY, A NEW POWER
Wholeness overcomes the shadow by absorbing it. Evil and wrong-doing are no longer isolated. Earlier I mentioned that damaging the ecosystem is an example of how misbehavior can be denied and swept under the carpet. But as attitudes change, we’ve discovered that the ecosystem is totally interconnected. 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.
Now expand the word “ecosystem” to a broader context. Wholeness must expand to take account of the laws that control pollution, social battles over global warming, personal attitudes about recycling, and ultimately our very way of being happy. Can we continue to be happy with a way of life that is slowly destroying the natural world? Everything you can possibly think of is encompassed by the ecosystem. It is the web of relationships in which we all exist. If you understand the web of relationships as an invisible place where everything comes together, you begin to see wholeness where divisions once existed.
In the current debate over the environment, two paths lie open. We can continue to deny the problem or we can face it. The first path is a false solution, because it doesn’t resolve the underlying fear and guilt of ecological destruction and future disasters. The second path eliminates fear and guilt the only way that proves viable: by solving the problem that leads to those emotions. The same holds true for the shadow. The problem calls for a holistic approach to solve it. Denial is a false solution.
If you acknowledge and embrace your shadow, it is actually nurturing, because the whole of life is nurturing—that is, life exists to sustain itself. When we get stuck in the drama of good versus evil, we impose our own limited perspective. After all, even when someone is committing a violent crime or going to war or victimizing someone else, the wrongdoer’s cells and organs don’t shut down. The body’s allegiance is to life, no matter how confused and conflicted the mind becomes.
A New Worldview
The miracle plays of the Middle Ages, which were performed on feast days, took the grim seriousness of evil and turned it into a cosmic joke. The Devil is a comic character who engages in every kind of bad deed, tempting souls and bringing torment, yet the Devil fails to see that in the end God is more powerful. Satan himself will be redeemed. In the end, the joke is on him; no one is out of God’s reach. In religious terms these miracle plays are saying that wholeness always overcomes separation. If you see the world in terms of good versus evil, you have missed the cosmic joke.
Whatever you think is wrong about yourself and too painful to confront can be seen a different way. Life—meaning your life and mine—transcends any win-or-lose orientation. Wholeness goes beyond simplistic cause-and-effect explanations. In the web of relationship, you function in a much larger context. Once you see yourself as part of the whole, a new understanding arises. There is no need to label yourself or anyone else as part of the good-versus-evil, right-versus-wrong drama. You can exchange judgment for the real experience of compassion, love, and forgiveness. That is the healing that comes with being whole.
But the holistic viewpoint also unleashes a deeper intuitive knowingness—you see why things are the way they are. It’s common to hear people say, “There’s a reason for everything that happens,” but usually, if asked what the reason is, they don’t actually know. The mind keeps searching in vain for cause-and-effect explanations. This effort gets us into strange speculations: “I once cheated on my wife and now this bankruptcy is payback” “I used to be full of anger, and now I have cancer” “The community quit believing in God’s commandments, and now a hurricane has leveled it.” Even if you reject such dark connections, you probably still harbor superstitions along the same lines, because we all do. We weren’t taught another way to explain the unseen workings of reality.
Let me suggest another way. What if everything that exists, visible or invisible, fits into a single scheme? In this scheme, the entire universe is made of consciousness. The largest events, such as the birth and death of galaxies, are connected to the smallest, the interactions of subatomic particles. Everything is part of one consciousness, which earlier ages called the mind of God. We don’t have to use religious terms. But like the traditional concept of God, consciousness is infinite, all-embracing, all-powerful, and all-knowing. It unfolds into myriad forms and shapes. Viewed through the five senses, some of these forms don’t appear conscious. It sounds peculiar to say that a jellyfish pulsating in the Pacific Ocean, a rock on the side of Mt. Everest, and a raindrop falling in Brazil are conscious. But we’re not talking about possessing a brain. A jellyfish, a rock, and a raindrop don’t have thoughts and feelings (so far as we know—it’s good to keep an open mind about the unknown). Therefore, we don’t feel intimately connected to the “nonconscious” life around us.
When we stand apart from objects and lower creatures, as we call them, something huge is being missed. There are principles that embrace all things. Look at a cell in your body and an electron hurtling through the darkness of space, and at an invisible level some deep similarities emerge:
Every action is coordinated with every other action.
Information is shared by every part of the whole.
Communication is instantaneous.
Energy is reshaped into countless variations, yet never lost.
Evolution produces more intricate forms as time unfolds.
Consciousness expands as forms become more complex.
These are very abstract terms, I know, but ultimately there is no need for words at all. When you see yourself as separate, words seem to matter much more than being. After all, being is passive, something we take for granted, while words run our lives, fill our heads, bring people together, and drive them apart. Yet all these words couldn’t exist without the silent intelligence inside every cell. The power that holds your body together, coordinating an infinite number of biological actions per second among hundreds of billions of cells, is more primal than thinking and using words.
Primal doesn’t mean primitive, a mistake we make when we get too proud of human reason. The consciousness found everywhere is inexpressible; it far exceeds the human mind. If we list the things that come to us from a mysterious source, that we experience deeply without words, it’s a wonder that anyone ever doubted the existence of the invisible world. Here’s a short list:
Love
Creativity
The sense of being alive
Beauty
Inspiration
Intuition
Dreams
Visions
Yearning
Fulfillment
The sense of belonging
Awe, wonder
Ecstasy, bliss
The numinous, a sense of the divine
A life filled with all these invisible qualities would be nothing less than a new way of being. No one would willingly refuse wonder, creativity, love, and all the rest. Yet millions of people do. They experience bliss and fulfillment in small doses that quickly fade. They fail to get past the shadow, which guards the riches of the unconscious with sharp claws and fangs. I once heard a guru lament to his audience, “I show you the gates of heaven, and when a goblin springs up shouting ‘Boo!’ you run away.”
Fear, anger, insecurity, anxiety, and the other aspects of the shadow feel like much more than “Boo!” If we are going to reach heaven’s gates, the only self that can get us there is the one we have. That’s the dilemma. How can a divided self ever attain wholeness? I’d like to propose that it can, but the way isn’t what most seekers think it is. Krishnamurti, the most dry-eyed, even ruthless of Indian sages, said, “Freedom isn’t the end of the path. It’s the beginning. There is nowhere to go. Freedom is the first and the last thing on the path.” He wasn’t trying to mystify his followers. Krishnamurti’s doctrine of the first and last freedom, as he dubbed it, was his way of saying that wholeness—the state of complete freedom—isn’t about choosing this or that. It isn’t about being good instead of bad, pure instead of impure. Wholeness has no divisions. It is everything. Therefore, it must be the beginning and the end at the same time. Our job is to turn this insight into a practical way of life.
What Is Wholeness Like?
The glory of human existence doesn’t lie in all the things that make us unique. It lies in the fact that we can unite with cosmic intelligence; each of us can become a conscious part of the whole. When that happens, you gain a world that is barely suggested by the thoughts and feelings of everyday life. It’s practical to live holistically, because with all of consciousness to draw upon, you will be much more creative and imaginative, much less judgmental. But for any of these benefits to come about, you have to experience what wholeness is really like. Let’s go into that now.
Wholeness Wants to Heal You
Wholeness always tries to restore itself. Your body has a complete array of healing techniques. Wholeness and healing are intimately connected (the two words derive from the same root word in Sanskrit). What does the body do to restore wholeness?
It seeks balance.
Every cell communicates with every other.
No part is more important than the whole.
Rest and activity are harmonized.
In the midst of constant activity, there is a stable foundation (known as homeostasis).
Every cell adapts to change in the environment.
Stress is countered and brought under control (disease and discomfort are basically the result of stress).
In each case, the body is keeping itself whole. The healing system extends everywhere. Your heart, brain, and liver cells all perform different functions, but keeping alive and healthy is their common goal; therefore, wholeness is more important than any single activity. If you look at your body as a metaphor for your life, what does it mean?
You will value balance.
The separate aspects of your life will work toward a common purpose.
Every aspect of living will assume equal value.
Rest will find a normal rhythm with activity.
Your core self, which is calm and at peace, won’t be disturbed in the midst of activity.
As your situation changes, you will adapt and remain resilient.
At the first signs that stress is throwing you out of your comfort zone, you will notice and respond.
You will value your well-being over any individual experience.
I’ve couched these points in general terms, but consider how differently two people would live if one chose wholeness and the other didn’t.
Wholeness Is Always a Gain, Never a Loss
To be whole is to be fully healed. If that is true, then no matter how well you live your life, you are not fully healed until the split self has been transformed. There are many ways to achieve a good life, and countless people find reasons not to seek wholeness (one of the biggest reasons for this is that they have never been exposed to a vision of the higher self as it really exists). It’s crucial to know that you won’t stop being yourself if you seek transformation.
The world of contrasts is seductive and dramatic. Without contrast, would we be doomed to eternal sameness? The stronger the light, the greater the shadow. This isn’t something created by humankind; it’s the way nature works. The alternative isn’t workable. If the universe did not have creative forces simultaneously opposing the force of decay, or entropy, there would be no universe.
Let’s say only the evolutionary, creative impulse existed in the universe. What would happen? The cosmos would rapidly run out of matter and energy to use for new forms, since the old ones would never wear out or become obsolete. In personal terms, we speak of becoming an evolved person, but if you only evolved without dissolving the old person that you were in the past, you would be a perpetual infant, child, adolescent, and adult at the same time. Your body would have countless layers of skin because old, dead cells weren’t sloughed off; your stomach lining would swell grotesquely without the work of digestive enzymes that constantly devour it so that it can be replaced every month.
On the other hand, if only the impulse of inertia or destruction existed, the universe would rapidly burn itself out. Entropy would cause “heat death” in short order, as the cosmos devolved into a cold, static void. We need these two opposing forces, but that isn’t an argument for dualism. In fact, it’s a strong argument for wholeness, since it takes a larger perspective than that from either side to keep them in balance.
Your body is capable of going into hyperdrive when the stress response is triggered. A flood of adrenaline speeds up the heart, draws extra energy from the bloodstream, alerts the mind, heightens the senses, and kicks you into gear for fight or flight. But if the stress response goes unchecked, it will kill you very quickly, in a matter of minutes. This has actually been observed in patients who have spent a length of time on steroids. The drugs they take to suppress inflammation, for example, also suppress the body’s hormone system. If you suddenly withdraw those drugs, the body has no ability to secrete the right balance of hormones. Therefore, you can walk up behind one of these patients, shout “Boo!” and send the person into a state in which stress hormones speed up the heart to a dangerous degree, often with fatal results.
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 illusion that we fall into is thinking that life forces us to choose between good and evil. In reality there’s a third way, which is to be whole. From the perspective of wholeness, you can balance the darkness and the light, being a slave to neither. The opposition between the two can be turned into creative tension. The good guys have to keep winning, but the bad guys better not lose altogether, because that would be the end of the story. The universe would become like a museum, fossilized and mummified forever.
The ideal is that the forces of truth, goodness, beauty, and harmony stay a step ahead of the dark forces. Your body manages to achieve that, as does the universe as a whole. We can’t deny the fact that life-forms are constantly evolving, moving to higher levels of abstraction, creativity, imagination, insight, and inspiration. Something is maintaining the balance, but tipping it slightly in favor of evolution. In many ways, spirituality does no more than imitate nature. If you can help tip the balance toward evolution rather than entropy and decay, you are a true spiritual warrior.
Wholeness Is Close, Not Far Away
There is a map of human consciousness that holds true in every wisdom tradition. In this map a timeless God serves as the source of creation. Even when the word “God” isn’t used, as in Buddhism, there is a state without division; it is whole; it contains everything both visible and invisible. The undivided state of Being then divides itself into the visible and invisible aspects of creation. Out of itself, oneness creates the many. You can imagine the map as a circle with a point in the middle. The point represents God as the source, which is smaller than the smallest particle of anything. The circle also represents God, but God as the manifest universe, which is larger than the largest anything.
But for the map to be accurate, you must see the circle as constantly expanding, like the universe after the big bang. Unlike the physical cosmos, though, God expands at infinite speed in all directions. This signifies the limitless potential of Being once it enters creation. So far, the map may seem esoteric, and many people would not see much practical value in it. (I once had a woman say to me that she was repelled by the words “One” or “All” as applied to God. To her, they signified being swallowed up in a sea of blankness, a divine void.) Our minds can’t grasp infinite expansion in all directions. But make the map personal. See your source as a point while your whole world is an expanding circle. The more you see, understand, and experience, the bigger the circle gets. Yet it is always expanding from the source. What this means is that the source is never far away. It’s a constant.
When you can experience yourself as your source and your world at the same time, you have become whole. The reason that your source seems far away is that you have identified with all the separate things in your world, neglecting the creative origin that makes everything possible. (This is like forgetting your mother as you grow up. No amount of forgetting will erase the fact that you had a mother who was your source.) It isn’t possible to lose the connection to your source entirely, because consciousness is what the source is made of. Being aware that you are alive means that you are connected to consciousness. This makes the connection sound passive, however, and it isn’t. Through this connection pours every thought you’ve ever had. There’s also a silent side to consciousness that works to keep you alive physically. Your heart is aware of what your liver is doing, not in words but through messages encoded in chemicals and electrical signals. Your body requires an infinite range of responses to be coordinated among hundreds of billions of cells. This is an aspect of consciousness that never gains a voice, but its intelligence far surpasses that of any genius.
Ordinary people worry that God may be so far away that he has forgotten us, while religious enthusiasts fervently believe that God is close at hand every moment. Both views have a flaw. “Near” and “far” are actually false terms. They derive from duality, since near is the opposite of far. But imagine the color blue. Before you saw it in your mind, was the color blue close to you or far away? Say the word “elephant” to yourself. Before you brought it to mind, was your vocabulary far from you or nearby? We use consciousness for individual reasons, in the service of “I, me, and mine,” but you can locate yourself in time and space without being able to locate your consciousness. There is no distance between you and a memory, you and your next thought. From the perspective of wholeness, since everything is being coordinated at once, distance isn’t relevant.
Which leads to an exciting conclusion: your potential for change isn’t far away, either. Potential is the same as unseen possibilities. Either you see that something is possible or you don’t. So the impossible is just another name for the unseen. Thus the shadow, which makes you see a limited, fearful world full of threat and dark possibilities, is masking many unseen possibilities that could spring into your awareness if you expanded beyond the shadow. Without expansion you are forced to have narrow vision. Think of having a bad toothache. The pain occupies your whole attention; you can’t think of anything else. If the human race were in constant physical pain, consciousness would never have expanded. Fear is anticipated pain, and it has the same effect of narrowing your awareness. Wholeness, it turns out, is the same as finding your source. There is no division at the source. You don’t have to conquer every aspect of yourself that is tinged with darkness (which would be impossible in any case). Become who you really are, and from that moment on darkness is no longer anything you can identify with.
You are living near the source of consciousness when the following are true:
You are at peace.
You cannot be shaken from your center.
You have self-knowledge.
You empathize without judgment.
You see yourself as part of the whole.
You are not in the world. The world is in you.
Your actions spontaneously benefit you.
Your desires manifest easily, without friction or struggle.
You can perform intense action with detachment.
You are not personally invested in any outcome.
You know how to surrender.
The reality of God is visible everywhere.
The best possible time is the present.
Wholeness Is Beyond the Shadow
Human beings have fought against the shadow for untold centuries, but as far as I have ever discovered, it has never been defeated. The only ones who conquer the shadow don’t fight it; they transcend it. When you transcend, you go beyond. In everyday life we transcend all the time. For example, when a mother sees her young child being cranky and demanding, she doesn’t meet the child on those grounds. She realizes that he’s tired and needs to sleep. What has she done? She has transcended the level of the problem, moving to a different level to find the solution. This gives rise to a spiritual truth: the level of the problem is never the level of the solution.
Instinctively we know this, yet applying it brings us to grief. Our fantasies force us to figure out which side is good and which is bad, in hopes that if we choose the winning side, victory will be total. It never is. Every dilemma has two sides. Every war fought in the name of God depends on an illusion, because the other side relies on God just as much. (Has any army adopted the slogan, “Victory is ours because God is not on our side”?) The enemies of transcendence play right into the hands of the shadow. You are choosing not to transcend when you struggle at the level of the problem.
Consider the following:
You have a chronic pain. Instead of going to the doctor, you take more painkillers.
You hear that someone dislikes you. You find reasons to dislike that person.
Your child is fighting with another child at school. You are certain that your child is in the right.
You hear that a couple is getting a divorce. You choose sides.
An evangelist comes to your door preaching a new religion. You slam the door in her face, because your God is the right one.
These are all instances in which the option to transcend has been rejected, and since these are such common situations, it’s not hard to see how the shadow gains power. In each case, one side has been labeled good and the other bad. Someone is made wrong, so that you can feel right. Being judgmental is validated as a healthy way to view the world. The process of escaping the fog of illusion begins when you realize that no one is benefiting except the shadow. You will never be right enough, victorious enough, or virtuous enough to dispel the anger, resentment, and fear that are engendered in the people you have made wrong. Once you see this, transcendence becomes a viable option. You start looking for the level of the solution rather than the level of the problem.
Wholeness Resolves All Conflicts
I wish that the word “transcend” didn’t come loaded with mystical connotations. When you realize that you can “go beyond” in any situation, transcending comes down to earth. Conflict is the nature of duality. Resolving conflicts is the nature of wholeness. This is only natural. When you aren’t just black or white, good or bad, light or dark, but both sides at once, conflict melts away. The first step is the most important. Shift your allegiance away from duality. Quit labeling, blaming, and judging. Give up fantasies of showing the world that you are right and others are wrong. Spiritual teachers have offered this advice for centuries. Remember what the Vedas proclaim: “You are not in the world. The world is in you.” Jesus taught that the kingdom of heaven is within. There has been no lack of teachings about the path to unity.
But people don’t heed these teachings, because the invisible world holds too much influence, much of it dark. Wholeness isn’t real until the hidden conflicts in your life are resolved. Let me outline these conflicts in ascending order, beginning at the most basic level, such as what a helpless child might experience. Each conflict becomes more difficult than the one before, until we reach the level of spiritual conflict, which is like a war inside your soul:
The conflict between being safe and being unsafe.
The conflict between love and fear.
The conflict between desire and necessity.
The conflict between acceptance and rejection.
The conflict between the One and the many.
These conflicts ensnare everyone, extending far beyond the individual. Think of the countries that proclaim peace, but feel so unsafe that their real energies go to armaments and defense. They haven’t resolved the basic problem of how to feel safe. Think of the times you have wanted to express love to someone, but felt afraid and vulnerable. You are in the same position as warring factions in a civil war who cannot embrace each other as one people. Conflict is entangled in everything, from relationships to international diplomacy.
Safe Versus Unsafe
The solution: Be established in your true self.
What does it take to feel safe in an uncertain world that is beyond your control? The great sages and teachers based their answer on the fundamental axiom that duality is unsafe and wholeness is safe. This is one of the great forgotten lessons. Many people work desperately to be safe by building up their defenses. They wall themselves off from the scarier elements of society. They cushion their existence with money and possessions. They lock the doors and pray that some unseen catastrophe doesn’t strike. These tactics derive from a primitive belief that says that if your body is safe from harm, you are safe. Perhaps we inherited this predisposition; perhaps it suits our materialistic way of life. People in past ages didn’t feel safe unless the gods, or God, approved their actions. To that end, they would tolerate being impoverished as long as organized religion told them that their souls were assured of salvation.
The modern view is that safety is psychological. To be safe in the world, you must find the inner key to safety. Houses, money, and possessions are irrelevant. In fact, some of the most insecure people are the ones who feel driven to excesses of wealth and success. The key to feeling safe psychologically is elusive. Freudian psychology holds that parenting in the first three years determines how safe a child feels growing up. Jungian psychology holds that feeling unsafe must be rooted in the collective psyche and specifically in the shadow, with its shared fund of fear and anxiety. But if you look at the results of a century of therapy, the psychological answer has barely worked in either case. So much insight and brilliance led to little more than the rise of Prozac and a generation of therapists who spend most of their time writing prescriptions for drugs.
You will feel safe when you discover that you have a core self. It exists at your source, as we saw previously. At the source there is no division, and therefore the external world can’t threaten the inner world. Anxiety needs an external focus, whether it’s the memory of some past trauma or a free-floating fear that creates dread simply because what comes next is not known. Your core self is stable and permanent; therefore it has nothing to fear from change. The unknown is necessary for change. When you make peace with that fact, the world will transform itself from a place of constant risk to the playground of the unexpected.
Love Versus Fear
The solution: Align with love as a force within.
Once you feel safe, you know that you have a right to be here. In order to feel that you actually belong, however, you must feel loved. Love is reassurance that you are cherished. Its opposite, which many people feel, is that you are a random speck tossed about in a chaotic world. The only sane reaction to that situation is fear. Religion has made stabs at offering complete and ultimate reassurance that God loves each of us, but at the same time it clings to the image of a fearsome, vengeful God. The reason that this duality is never resolved isn’t mysterious. No one will ever meet God and ask if God really loves us or despises us, if God wants us saved or damned. From Moses to Muhammad, the divine has been confronted and asked that very question. The answer always seems to be both.
To escape fear, trusting in a loving God won’t work, because that is either an intellectual choice, which is always open to doubt, or an emotional one, which is always open to hurt. As long as you can doubt or be hurt, naturally divine love will seem untrustworthy. Yet in consciousness we are able to experience the flow of love as a constant force, not a personal whim of the deity. The ancient rishis of India affirmed that bliss (ananda in Sanskrit) is not gained or lost. It is built into the nature of consciousness. Bliss in its purest form is ecstasy, joy, rapture. But consciousness unfolds from unmanifest and invisible to manifest and visible. As this unfoldment happens, bliss becomes an aspect of nature that has many qualities:
Bliss is dynamic—it moves and changes.
Bliss is evolutionary—it grows.
Bliss is pervasive—it wants to enter everything.
Bliss is desirous—it seeks fulfillment.
Bliss is inspiring—it increases by creating new forms to inhabit.
Bliss is unifying—it shatters boundaries of separation.
In the West we ascribe these qualities to love, which is bliss under another name. Love makes two hearts one. Love inspires great poetry and works of art. It breaks down the barriers between people. There is a tradition that venerates love going back as far as the records of time. Yet there is no doubt that we live in a loveless age, thanks to skepticism and materialism. Neither force set out to renounce love, but they have reduced love to brain chemicals, psychological conditioning, good or bad parenting, and mental health. None of these things are wholly negative; they lead to valuable insights. For good or ill, however, the tradition of exalting love as holy has been greatly weakened. What is left is that each person must discover whether the force of love can be experienced; seeking love has become another form of spiritual seeking.
I am fond of technology and gadgets, one of which is Twitter. I began to send and receive tweets by the hundreds, and the whole activity became seductive. One day I was tweeted with a question: “I’m looking for love. How can I find the right one? Does he even exist?” Immediately I tweeted back, “Stop looking for the right one. Be the right one.” It was an instinctive reply, and I was amazed to discover that my answer was retweeted (i.e., forwarded) to two million people. The reason this seemed like such a novel answer, I came to realize, is that love has become such a problem that people genuinely are baffled about where it exists. A reply that seemed natural to me was exotic to many others.
What does it take to be the right one, which means to find love within? It takes the absence of fear. Love doesn’t need seeking. Like the air you breathe, it exists as part of nature; it’s a given. Yet, like any aspect of your core self, it can be masked. In fact, external love is often irrelevant. Someone who is depressed and anxious or who has a damaged sense of self won’t respond easily (sometimes not at all) to loving gestures from another person. To find love, you must be capable of seeing yourself as lovable. The core self takes a simple view—“I am love”—because at the source that is exactly who you are. But in a world of conflicting values, this simple statement becomes confused and complex. The fog of illusion creates fear. Remove the fear, and what remains is love.
Desire Versus Necessity
The solution: Choiceless awareness.
“It has to be this way.” How many times have you heard these words or thought them to yourself? Life presents us with impasses. We want to do something, but the way is blocked. Perhaps someone with an inflated ego says, “My way or the highway.” More often, two people are stuck because they can’t communicate. At one extreme is psychological compulsion, such as phobias (“I’m too afraid to do X”) and obsessions (“I can’t get my mind off Y”). These look like very different situations. A husband who refuses to go to a marriage counselor doesn’t obviously resemble a phobic who can’t stand heights or an obsessive-compulsive who washes her hands twenty times a day. But there is a common denominator. Each of them is trapped between desire and necessity. The result is also the same: they are no longer free to choose.
Endless energy is wasted trying to get past impasses. We call upon mediators, negotiators, and judges to settle disputes, yet in the final wash the party who loses always feels aggrieved. The conflict may be resolved on the surface, but not underneath. We go to doctors and therapists in the hopes that some illness can be diagnosed and treated. Here at least there’s a chance of looking deeper. Yet the diagnosis is usually much easier to find than the treatment. Prozac and related antidepressants have proved effective in quelling the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), but not in actually healing the underlying condition, which returns if the patient goes off medication.
Yet no matter how skillful you are at negotiating, no matter how tactful and empathic you happen to be, the conflict between desire and necessity can’t be totally resolved. Life itself presents situations where you can’t get what you want. Not everyone marries the man or woman of their dreams. Failure in business is always possible. Winning is kept out of one’s grasp. To a pessimist, there are more frustrations inherent in life than satisfactions. The sages and guides in every wisdom tradition have seen that desire is often blocked. It’s surprising, then, that the Vedic tradition of India hardly ever touches upon resignation, patience, and self-sacrifice as virtues. Instead, the deepest wisdom of India teaches that there is a state known as “choiceless awareness.” At first sight this seems synonymous with giving up. You don’t make a choice, you give up taking sides.
We need to be clear: choiceless awareness isn’t about giving up on what you want. It’s about shifting your allegiance away from what the ego wants to what the universe wants. In choiceless awareness you let consciousness make all the decisions. In other words, the thing you want is also the best thing you could want. In such a state of awareness, according to the ancient rishis, there is no resistance from inside or out. Nature upholds your desires through a cosmic force known as dharma. It is a very fluid term. To the average person in India, to be in your dharma means that you have found the right work and manage to do the right thing in your behavior. Dharma is virtue or right living. At a deeper level, being in your dharma means that you are on the correct path spiritually. You are following the precepts of your religion and not falling into traps along the way.
But neither of these states resolves the conflict between “I want to” and “I have to.” Desire and necessity remain at war. If anything, righteous people find themselves bound by far more duties and obligations than ordinary people, since religions of every stripe make many demands and attempt to curb all kinds of desires. Only choiceless awareness brings the conflict to an end, because when you reach this level of consciousness, what you want is also what you need to do, for your good and the good of the whole world.
In choiceless awareness, no one needs to tell you the rules of dharma. Instead, you have assimilated the dharma—you actually live the axiom, “I am not in the world; the world is in me.” To maintain such a state requires dedicated personal growth, but everyone has experienced times like the following:
You are carefree.
There is an absence of guilt and self-judgment.
You experience a feeling of rightness.
Outside conditions don’t block you.
Other people cooperate without putting up resistance.
The fruits of your actions are positive.
Desire ends in a feeling of fulfillment and satisfaction.
As you can see, this is a special combination of ingredients. Yet when you align with the force of dharma, this is your normal state. It’s not enough simply to get what you want. Many people, if they have enough power and money, can fulfill their slightest whim without much effort. But feeling satisfied and fulfilled is much rarer, and often the exercise of power and money only inflames a person’s desires and leads to deeper dissatisfaction. You can’t satisfy your ego by giving it everything it wants, because the ego’s whole reason for existence is to accumulate. It wants more money, possessions, status, love, power, and on and on. The machinery is fixed in place; it runs on a set program that is all but impossible to rewrite. The desires of the ego are superficial. Your true self is without ego. You aren’t aiming for gain; you don’t fear loss. When you give of yourself, you aren’t secretly calculating what you’ll get in return.
We are fortunate that there is another way to view the world, not from the ego’s perspective, but from beyond ego, where wholeness exists. As the ego’s hold is weakened, there’s a subtle fusing of “I want to” and “I must.” To act as the dharma—the will of God—would have you act totally naturally. You’re simply being yourself.
Acceptance Versus Rejection
The solution: Unbounded awareness.
Fear of rejection cripples millions of people. It makes unrequited love a tragedy understood in every culture. Spiritually, you cannot be rejected unless you reject yourself. I doubt that any message has been so misunderstood, for when someone else rejects you, the pain feels inflicted, and you are the victim. To unravel how rejection works, therefore, we need to look deeper into the whole issue of judgment. This isn’t a new topic, yet there’s something new to add. All judgment comes down to judging against yourself. Self-judgment takes many forms, such as fear of failure, a sense of victimization, a general lack of confidence, and so on. Much of the time there is only a vague feeling of “I’m not good enough” or “No matter how much I achieve, I’m actually a fraud.”
Many people hit upon a false solution. They develop an ideal image and then try to live up to this image and convince the world that it’s who they are. (Hence the legend of the perfect pickup line that always works on women in a singles bar, a desperate fantasy that one can connect through image alone.) An idealized self-image can be so convincing that you even convince yourself. How many investment bankers, in the wake of the reckless greed that nearly brought down the world economy in 2008, continued to see themselves as not just innocent, but superior to the disaster they set in motion?
An idealized self sounds like a model of acceptance. Listen to what it tells you: “You’re doing the right thing. You’re in control. No one can hurt you. Just keep being the way you are now.” Thus shielded, you can hardly do wrong, and if you do, your misdeeds are quickly covered up and forgotten. The beauty of having an ideal image of yourself is that you actually do feel good about who you are. The image substitutes for painful reality.
As you would expect by now, the shadow has something to say in this matter. At regular intervals some icon of righteous ness, usually a preacher or public moralist, falls into scandal. Invariably these individuals have committed the very sins they accuse others of, improper sexual misbehavior being the most typical. Cynically we imagine that these Elmer Gantrys are rank hypocrites, that they live out the sham of public virtue so that they can pursue vice in private.
In reality fallen icons are extreme examples of an idealized self-image. Their powers of denial were superhuman. The shadow couldn’t touch them. Then when the shadow did surface, an enormous sense of guilt and shame surfaced with it. Once they fall, these professional saints indulge in extremes of public atonement. Even in contrition, nothing feels real.
If you pull back from the spectacle, however, the whole drama could have been avoided. An idealized self-image isn’t a viable solution. Only true self-acceptance is, and when that happens, there is nothing for others to reject. This doesn’t mean you will be universally loved. Someone else might still walk away, but if that happens, you won’t feel rejected. It won’t result in an emotional wound. How do you know if you are falling for a false sense of self, which is what an idealized self-image is? You will hold such attitudes as the following:
“I’m not like those people. I’m better.”
“I’ve never strayed.”
“God is proud of me.”
“Criminals and wrongdoers aren’t even human.”
“Everyone sees how good I am. Even so, I need to remind them.”
“If I don’t have bad thoughts, why do other people?”
“I already know who I am and what I need to do. I’m not conflicted.”
“I’m a role model.”
“Virtue isn’t its own reward. I want my good deeds to be validated.”
Dismantling your ideal image of yourself is a challenge, because this is a much subtler defense than simple denial. Denial is blindness; the idealized self-image is pure seduction. The way out is to go past all images. There is no need to defend who you really are. Your true self is acceptable not because you are so good, but because you are complete. All things human belong to you.
The most important ally you have is awareness. Judgment is constrictive. When you label yourself or anyone else as bad, wrong, inferior, unworthy, and so on, you are looking through a narrow lens. Expand your vision and you will be aware that everyone, however flawed, is complete and whole at the deepest level. The more aware you are, the more you will accept yourself. This isn’t an instant solution. You must spend time looking at all the feelings you’ve so diligently denied, suppressed, and disguised. Fortunately, those feelings are temporary; you can go beyond them. There’s nothing to reject, just a lot to work through. This is how a figure like Jesus or Buddha could have compassion for anyone. By seeing the wholeness behind the play of light and dark, they found nothing to blame. The same holds true along the spiritual path you follow. As you see yourself more completely, you will have compassion for your faults, and that will lead to complete self-acceptance.
The One Versus the Many
The solution: Surrender to being.
Finally, we arrive at the war in your soul. At this level, the conflict is very subtle, which sounds odd, because we tend to think that the cosmic battle between God and Satan must be titanic. In fact, it’s very delicate. As you get closer to your true self, you begin to sense that you are part of everything. Boundaries soften and disappear. There’s a blissful feeling of merging. As beautiful as this experience is, one last resistance crops up. The ego says, “What about me? I don’t want to die,” like the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz, whose last words were “I’m melting, I’m melting!” The ego has been incredibly useful. It has guided you through a world of infinite diversity. Now you are about to experience unity. No wonder the ego feels fatally threatened; it sees it usefulness (and its domination) come to an end.
The ego mistakes surrender for death. To be whole involves surrender. You give up one way of seeing yourself, and in its place a new way dawns. “Surrender” isn’t a welcome word to the ego, because it connotes failure, loss of control, passivity, the end of power. When you lose an argument, aren’t you surrendering to the winner? Of course. Any situation couched in terms of winning and losing makes surrender seem weak, shameful, depressing, and unworthy. These are all feelings at the ego level, however. Seen without ego, surrender becomes natural and desirable. A mother who gives her children what they need isn’t losing, even though one could say she’s surrendering her needs in favor of her children’s. That would be a false perspective. When you give of yourself out of love, you lose nothing. In fact, loving surrender is like a gain. Your sense of self expands beyond ego-driven needs and desires—these can never lead to love.
Surrender is not of the mind. You cannot think your way there. Instead, you must journey into pure consciousness, before words and thoughts arise. That’s the whole purpose of meditation, to carry a person beyond the thinking mind, which means beyond conflict. It’s easy to believe these days that everyone knows how to meditate. If you have tried to meditate and then abandoned the practice, I’d like to suggest that you return. Not all meditations are created alike. 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.
Which is not to label any kind of meditation as wrong. But there has to be an intimate rightness that suits you. I’ve seen people who evolved very quickly using a simple heart meditation, in which they sat quietly and directed their attention to their hearts, and others who benefited by quietly following the in-and out-breaths as they sat with eyes closed. Eventually one longs to experience the true self completely. This can be achieved by going into the mantra meditation that originated in Vedic India or the Vipassana techniques of Buddhism, to mention just two proven methods. Whatever you do, remain awake to your vision of wholeness. 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.)
The shadow is a thing of denial, resistance, hidden fears, and repressed hopes. Therefore, if meditation is working, these things will begin to diminish. You should be experiencing the following on your spiritual path:
Life becomes easier, losing its struggle.
You feel and act more spontaneous.
The world no longer brings negative reflections.
Your desires are fulfilled more easily.
You find happiness in the simplicity of existence. Being here is enough.
You gain in self-awareness, knowing who you really are.
You feel included in the wholeness of life.
If these sound like ideal goals, they are also noble ones and fully attainable. In fact, if months pass and you don’t feel these things increasing, you need to stand back and reexamine your path. I’m not implying that your practice is wrong or defective. There are lulls and delays in personal evolution for everyone, because some issues take time to work out. Much of this working out takes place out of sight, in the deeper reaches of the unconscious. Artists are well aware of this; their muse doesn’t answer on a time schedule. On the other hand, there may be serious reasons why the true self isn’t unfolding:
Excessive stress
Emotional pressures
Distractions
Depression and anxiety
Lack of discipline or commitment
Opposing intentions—seeking more than one way of life
The spiritual path delivers everything; it can resolve all conflicts. But we expect too much of it when we ask for a panacea. Spiritual unfoldment is delicate. It can’t be reached when your mind is too agitated or your attention overwhelmed by stress and other outside pressures. In other words, wholeness is a cure-all, but not an instant cure-all. You need to prepare the right conditions for going inward. To that end, each of the obstacles I’ve listed has to be dealt with. Stress, depression, anxiety, and distractions won’t suddenly end just because you sit down for half an hour with your eyes shut. I hope that doesn’t sound too blunt, because when you take even small steps to prepare the ground for meditation, it yields results that cannot be had any other way. This is the royal road to consciousness, and consciousness is whole.
In Summary
I will end as I began, with a physician’s instinct for diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis. The shadow has outwitted and outlasted many approaches, yet some people have succeeded, and not just the great names like Jesus and Buddha. The force of evolution is infinitely stronger than the obstacles that block its way. You only have to gaze around you at the natural world to see the proof that beauty, form, order, and growth have survived for billions of years. In dealing with your shadow, you are aligning yourself with the same infinite power. After all is said and done, the requirements are not complex:
I’ve laid out a vision of unity as the solution to the shadow. The instant that life is split into good and evil, the self follows suit. A divided self cannot make itself whole. There must be another level of life that is whole already. Casting their eyes over the invisible world, the ancient sages of India realized that it was indescribable. The Vedic scriptures from thousands of years ago were the first to declare, “Those who know it speak of it not. Those who speak of it know it not.”
But of course people weren’t thrilled to hear this teaching. They wanted help with their everyday problems. If a vision cannot be turned into practice, it’s arid and useless. The ancient sages weren’t trying to discourage their listeners. Quite the opposite, they were trying to give a reliable map, and where that map leads is to unity consciousness. My aim in this part of the book has been to draw the same map in vivid, modern colors. Now it’s up to you to follow it. The shadow isn’t a fearsome opponent, but a worthy one. Powerful as it is, the power of wholeness is infinitely greater, and by a miracle of creation it is within your grasp.