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The message of the world's greatest philosophy books can be summarized in this one sentence: Any beauty in life you may miss is a dark shadow compared to the overflowing beauty yours to experience every moment of every day.
when you face the demons
in the deep dark forest
they tend to become
your friends
Never fear shadows.
They simply mean there's a light shining somewhere nearby.
A candle never sees it own shadows
"To heal is to chage the perception of a condition - not the condition! This is True perception.
This is standing on the bridge of the cross. The very concept of opposites is a concept of division, of split seeing. We only see one side of the whole at a time. If someone paid us with a coin we most certainly would not say: 'I dislike the tail side of the coin, give me the head side only'. A coin comes with two sides, so does life in the temporal world. We accept the two sides of the coin as one coin. Yet we do not accept the two sides of life as ONE life.
Obviously, there is a conflict here and that is our way of seeing. True perception always sets free from conflict because it does not perceive conflict. 'Ah,' I hear someone say, 'Wise words, indeed. But what if I lie dying of thirst in the desert. How could True perception give me water?' Remember the principle of stabilized perception? We recall: it is a fact that we believe what we see. It is equally a fact that we do not see what we do not believe. Another way of putting it is: we only experience what we hold possible. What we do not hold possible we do not experience in the case of the thirsty man it means he holds it possible to die of thirst. He sees what he believes.
True perception sees not lack of water as the man's problem. It sees fear of death as the underlying principle of the problem - this is the idea the problem contains. Lack of water in this case is the form through which the idea of fear of death expresses. Giving the man water may quench his thirst but cannot quench his fear. The next time around the man shall fear again. This means he has not understood the principle fear represents. Now he needs more contrast again to help him remove his 'blinkers' to learn to look past the form aspect of his problem, the lack of water. True perception would now look at (fear of) death and recognize it for what it really is, a perverted way of seeing life, the Ego's answer to life. Once again it would see the idea of death as nothing but the voice against God, a shadow of life. A shadow is an appearance, is absence of light. Absence of ilght cannot be, for light, or love or God, is All-There-Is. Therefore this shadow must be an imagined appeareance. Imagined appearances are dreams. In other words, True perception recognizes any experience which offers the temptation to doubt life as part of the great dream, and dissociates itself from such madness. What is cannot see as real it cannot believe in. What I cannot believe, I cannot experience. This is the reason for the answer to the thirsty fellow, for to him I say: 'With True perception needs not the contrast of such as experience, for contrast only comes to teach True perception!"
The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.
Eventually, as we become more fully aware of our problems, another critical point is reached, when insights really have occurred and we try to act upon them. We then discover to our dismay that our attempts to solve them by an effort of will avails us nothing, that our good intentions, as the saying goes, merely pave the way to hell. Good intentions all too readily can foster the illusion that we have settled an issue, when actually it is far from settled and seems to have not the slightest intention of ever being settled. This leads to a deadlock in which we see we need to change but cannot, try as we may. We know we need to renounce our egoistic controlling attempts but we cannot even make ourselves do that. We are up against the paradox that discipline and conscious effort are indispensable but do not get us far enough in our really critical areas. We reach the point where we are tempted to give up in despair because after all, what's the use? We begin to feel that analysis is like deliberate, organized torture; the most problematic things are rubbed in again and again and no matter how we exert ourselves there is no way to change them.
This state has its meaning too. As Dante puts it, the entrance to purgatory is at the deepest point of hell. A resolution of this seemingly hopeless impasse eventually occurs by virtue of the awareness that the ego's claim of a capacity to control rests on an illusion. Without the actual experience of this sort of impasse the ego cannot renounce its claim to the central position. It is only when we have come to our wits' end, and this in the face of our most sincere and extreme efforts, only when we realize that we are hopelessly incapable of changing ourselves, can we begin to accept our real existential position in the life drama. When we are able to say. "this is I, this is my being, and nothing can save me from or free me from being this sort of person," then we have come to the point of acceptance that initiates a fundamental transformation of which we are the object, not the subject. Transformation of our personality occurs in us, upon us but not by us. The unconscious changes itself and us in response to our awareness and acceptance of our station, of our cross.
Ask someone to give a description of the personality type which he finds most despicable, most unbearable and hateful, and most impossible to get along with, and he will produce a description of his own repressed characteristics-a self-description which is utterly unconscious and which therefore always and everywhere tortures him as he receives its effect from the other person. These very qualities are so unacceptable to him precisely because they represent his own repressed side; only that which we cannot accept within ourselves do we find impossible to live with in others. Negative qualities which do not bother us so excessively, which we find relatively easy to forgive-if we have to forgive them at all-are not likely to pertain to our shadow.
Evil is like a shadow - it has no real substance of its own, it is simply a lack of light. You cannot cause a shadow to disappear by trying to fight it, stamp on it, by railing against it, or any other form of emotional or physical resistance. In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it.
Character is like a tree and reputation is like a shadow, the shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.
"To move forward, you must figure out exactly what is obstructing you. Whatever it is, it isn't really there; it has no reality, no substance. It's your own creation, a phantom lurking in the shadows of your mind, a shadow demon. Your obstructions are your demons, and your demons are shadow dwellers. They live and thrive in the half-light of ignorance, so the way to slay a demon is by illuminating it with the full force and power of your focused attention; by looking at it, hard. Banish shadow with light and see for yourself that no obstruction exists, nor ever did. We create our demons and we feed them. To awaken we must slay them. That's really the whole process: Slay one demon, take one step.
Repeat."
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
In the book of Job written several centuries before the New Testament, Yaweh subject his “faithful servant,” Job, to a harrowing series of tests, after excepting a wager from Satan that Job’s faith can be broken. “Job is no more the outward occasion for an inward process of dialectic in God,” wrote Jung. Like a scientist performing some cruel experiment on bacilli in a test tube, Yaweh kills Job’s family, removes his land, riddles him with disease, and inflicts every imaginable form of ruin upon him. Job, however, remains steadfast. At the same time, he is determined to understand the reason for his plight. According to Jung, Job is the first man to comprehend the split inside Yaweh – that the God-image is an antimony, comprising both the dark god of cruelty and the benevolent deity of love and justice; “in light of this realization his knowledge attains a divine numinosity.” Confronted by archetypal injustice, Job insists on equalizing compassion, and eventually receives it, as his status in the world is restored.
Despite his overpowering might, the creator fears the judgment of his creature. “Yaweh projects onto Job a skeptic’s face which is hateful to him because it is his own, and which gazes at him with an uncanny and critical eye,” Jung noted. From the perspective of the God-image, Job had attained a higher state of knowledge than Yaweh through his trvails, and this required a compensatory sacrifice, enacted, a few hundred years later, through the incarnation of Christ.
Jung realized that God intended to fully incarnate in the collective body of humanity, and that this time was quickly approaching. From his psychoanalytic and personal work and theoretical musings, he proposed that the Christian Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost was unfolding into a “quaternity,” adding a fourth element that had been suppressed from the Western psyche. “The enigma of squaring the circle” was one representation of this quaternity, “an age-old and presumably pre-historic symbol, always associated with the idea of a world-creating deity.” This aspect of divinity, now returning and requiring assimilation into consciousness, was the Devil, who had been dissociated from the Western psyche at the beginning of the Judeo-Christian aeon. Along with the Devil, the fourth element also represented natural wisdom, personified by the Gnosticc deity Sophia, long exiled and excised from the canonical texts.
Since the creator is an antimony, a totality of inner opposites, his creatures reflect this schism. To descend into humanity, God must choose “the creaturely man filled with darkness – the natural man who is tainted with original sin,” Jung wrote. “The guilty man is eminently suitable and is therefore chosen to become the vessel for the continuing incarnation, not the guiltless one who holds aloof from the world, and refuses to pay his tribute to life, for in him the dark God would find no room.” The uniting of opposites, the reconciliation of dark and light contained in the God-image, can only take place within the consciously realized “guilty man,” not the sanctimonious, ascetic, or self-righteous one – anyone who denies their shadow will only project it in some new form.
The visitors seem to be entities that sustain themselves from the negative emotions such as fear and anxiety, emanated by the human nervous system and energy body
…
Chogyal Namkai Norbu writes in Dzogchen: The Self Perfected State:
Duality is the real root of our suffering and all our conflicts. All our concepts and beliefs, no matter how profound they may seem, are like nets which trap us in dualism. When we discover our limitations we have to try and overcome them, untying ourselves from whatever type of religious, political, or social conviction may condition us. We have to abandon such concepts as “enlightenment,” “the nature of the mind,” and so on, until we no longer neglect to integrate our knowledge with our actual existence.
…
Connected to our technological development, the Grays embody a malignant, supersensible element lurking beneath our fascination with mechanization, revealing the irrational basis of our constricted rationality. They also have lessons to teach us. As the critic Lewis Mumford noted, “Our capacity to go beyond the machine rests on our power to assimilate the machine. Until we have absorbed the lessons of objectivity, impersonality, neutrality, the lessons of the mechanical realm, we cannot go further in our development toward the more richly organic, the more profoundly human.” Like transhumanist zombies, the Grays embody the reductive perspective that sees everything – matter, genes, human souls – as resources to be used for purposes of control and domination. In this way, the visitors serve as a warning, as well as an inoculation against a nightmarish fate we can recognize, and reject, in the time that remains to us.
[Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas – shadow work]
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
It is the difficult, but unavoidable, task of the modern individual to assimilate consciously all of the contents – from darkest degradation to profoundest purpose – contained in the psyche.
Evil (ignorance) is like a shadow. It has no real substance of its own, it is simply a lack of light. You cannot cause a shadow to disappear by trying to fight it, stamp on it, by railing against it, or any other form of emotional or physical resistance. In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it.
Like the sun's rays that cause the seed to stir within its husk, love's radiant energy penetrates the facade of the false self, calling forth resources hidden deep within us. Its warmth wakes up the life inside us, making us want to uncurl, to give birth, to grow and reach for the light. It calls on us to break out of our shell, the personality-husk surrounding the seed potential of all that we could be. The purpose of a seed husk is to protect the tender life within until the time and conditions are right for it to burst forth. Our personality structure serves a similar function. It provides a semblance of security, as a kind of compensation for the loss of our larger being. But when love's warming rays start to wake us up, our ego-shell becomes a barrier restricting our expansion. As the germ of life swells within us, we feel our imprisonment more acutely.....The brighter love's radiance, the darker the shadows we encounter; the more we feel life stirring within us, the more we also feel our dead spots; the more conscious we become, the more clearly we see where we remain unconscious. None of this need dishearten us. For in facing our darkness, we bring to light forgotten parts of our being. In recognizing exactly where we have been unconscious, we become more conscious. And in seeing and feeling the ways we've gone dead, we start to revive and kindle our desire to live more expansively.
The brighter the light, the clearer the shadow
Our lives can be considered a sacred quest. It is a quest which may have begun in this lifetime or many lifetimes before. It is a quest to find ourselves: who and what we really are. To do this we must first cease to pretend to be what we are not. We must cast away our Persona or mask. We must be prepared to confront the Shadow, that which we are and rather were not. Only then can we unify our conscious and unconscious minds and so give birth to the hidden Sun - the Self.
Shambhala: [Laughing] Actually, the most common ad hominen criticism as of late is that you are a very controlling person. You have tried to build a huge and encompassing system because psychologically you want to control everything and everybody.
KW: Yes, I've heard that, but only from critics who have never met me, which suggests to me that these critics are simply projecting their own shadow onto me. Because the people who know me don't say that I am competitive or controlling.
Shambhala: What do they say that you are?
KW: Borderline psychotic.
