In my last post I talked about shadow and how it operates to obscure and project those parts of ourselves that we don't want to acknowledge or deal with. But we all know that we're imperfect on some scale. Our postmodern culture indoctrinates us to reject any hierarchical assessment that would call us anything less than perfect, so why does this even matter? And if we are to agree that it's important, what are we to do about it?
Sage and teacher J. Krishnamurti spoke at great length about fragmentation, and that's essentially what shadow is: it is the fragmentation of the identity and hence the strength of character. This creates an internal tension in the consciousness, because the mind is rejecting part of the whole. Krishnamurti described this:
There is only conflict, opposition, contradiction in consciousness. There is this field of consciousness which we have described. Where there is opposition, contradiction, that is the field of conflict. There may be fragments. Each fragment being fragmentary will produce conflict, pain, pleasure, sorrow, agony, despair.
And:
We see there is no actual division at all. I see it non-verbally. I feel it that the observer is a fragment which separates itself from the rest of the fragments and is observing. In that observation there is a division, as the observer and the observed, there is conflict, there is confusion. When the mind realizes this fragmentation and the futility of separating itself, then it sees the movement as a whole. If you cannot do this you cannot possibly put the next question, which is: what is beyond the conscious? What is below, above, beside? - it doesn't matter how you put it.
These fragments -- the composite of the shadow -- are the source of conflict, which agitates our emotional reactions to occasions which arise in life. I mentioned in my last entry how Zen master Diane Hamilton echoes this in her teaching that we can identify shadow projections by positive and negative emotional reactions. Eastern traditions do not distinguish between pleasure and pain, between happiness and sorrow as sources of suffering. By tying our contentment to that which is transient, we assure ourselves the experience of suffering. That which brings pleasure today will eventually bring suffering, even if only by its eventual loss. In this transient and tumultuous world, peace an only be found in active non-attachment.
Active non-attachment is not simply renunciation, nor especially is it the abhorrence of all things good and bad. Active non-attachment means that we actively engage in life, experiencing life to its fullest but expecting nothing from life but what it gives. If we expect too much or hold on to what we have, we will suffer by denial or loss. If we expect too little we suffer from cynicism. If we check out and take the ambivalent road, we miss the point altogether.
Live is a process of evolution. From the first impulse that kicked off this whole thing fifteen billion years ago until now, the universe has been on a constant growth trajectory. It is constantly expanding, and that which it envelops is constantly developing. Most importantly to us, human consciousness -- a very spry 60,000 or so years young -- is advancing with increasing momentum. But within in fragmentation and conflict are growing, and the fruits of that strife are wars, oppression, inequity, and extinction. We are on an unsustainable path, and this feeling is not unfamiliar. It's the feeling of the shadow emerging.
Collective consciousness is nothing mystical; it is the net result of having a concentration of consciousness in one place, asserting the mean of its collective volition. If there is conflict in that will, then that conflict will be reflected in the state of the world. And it is. Those who proclaim the advancement of human consciousness are working to eliminate that conflict by raising awareness from an ethnicity-/nation-centric level to a global and ultimately cosmic level. The problem I foresee is that as consciousness develops, the conflicts embedded in ego become more acute. I call this the "egoic backlash." Every time I undergo an expansive shift in perspective it leaves less room for ego to operate. Ego can create strong negative reactions that bring to light issues that must be addressed or else fall back into the darkness of unconsciousness. This is the shadow emerging, and it occurs on the collective level as well as the individual. We must learn and begin integrating the shadow on the individual level so that we can learn how to do so on the collective level.
The Devil Inside
I believe there are two ways we can approach our growth. We can take the self-improvement path, which I wrote about in The Birth and Death of a Personal Growth Practice, in which we identify all the ways we want to improve and try to knock them off the list. The problem with this approach is that it's like trying to keep dry by catching rain in a bucket. Your bucket fills up fast and you still get wet. The point is, are you focused on addressing the details, or transcending them by growing the core? It's a lot more work -- and less effective -- to try to knock off every point on a list that is only going to grow as you become more aware of the ways in which you can grow. It's only a top-down approach, like using an umbrella, that has the ability to produce real change. The act of opening an umbrella causes the rain to simply fall away.
This raises the question of whether it's ultimately useful to call out the shadow in order to overcome and assimilate it, or to let it lie as dormant as possible until you have outgrown it. That raises a number of questions. Can one outgrow the deliberate fragmentation of the awareness? Can one assimilate aspects of the self that have been rejected by growing past them? Is it useful to call out the shadow for a duel, possibly inviting the greatest possible of personal trials?
Before starting his teaching, Jesus went into the desert and was tempted. This was not an exercise in futility by an entity fighting a losing battle. Jesus willfully entered the long, dark night of the soul because it was his need to integrate elements of his own shadow before taking on the role of teacher. There can be no doubt that this was a personal trial of the deepest sort, and a necessary one for his spiritual path.
The answer for me lay in understanding what the top-down approach really means. Top-down means addressing the discrete cause: the cause that subsumes other causes but is itself not subsumed by another. So many shadow facets will not be useful to bring to light, because they are themselves symptoms of other aspects of shadow. But when you find a cause that has no other cause, that's something you are going to have to face at one time or another. There are aspects of the self that are so fundamental that they must be reconciled or they will hinder growth and understanding.
Finding Shadow
The difficulty with addressing the shadow as opposed to pursuits of self-enhancement is that you're trying to address issues that you are actively obscuring from yourself. These are issues that are staring you in the face, yet you don't see them. You can feel the lurking presence of the unaddressed, and you can sense the drag on your life and on your growth, but since you are pushing it outside of your perspective, there was no way to consciously identify it. This is the weakness of introspective practices that is not commonly seen by teachers or practitioners.
Meditation is good. Self-inquiry is good. But they can never show a complete picture because the picture is always formed in the imperfect eye of the examiner. So anything that is hidden by the examiner -- any elements of shadow, the deliberately obscured self -- will be missed. This can be problematic as the states that meditative experience gives rise to lead the meditator to believe that they have incorporated the whole into their perspective. But that "whole" is only as complete as the self that incorporates it. If the meditator has not integrated the shadow self, then the "whole" will be similarly incomplete. If the meditator believes they are experiencing an unabridged whole, it will more firmly entrench the shadow because the belief that all has been comprehended closes the mind to the existence of anything which has not been comprehended.
On the other hand, therapy provides a purely bottom-up approach, so it tends to overwhelm the individual in an ocean of issues in which it becomes difficult to discriminate the discrete causes from the incidental. Some forms of therapy will actually mistakenly identify events as discrete causes; they are not. Experiences may be the reason for obscuring an issue in shadow, but that is because the experience brings an issue into view that the individual doesn't want to see. In the case of certain traumatic experiences such as abuse, it is possible that the issue would not exist without the precipitating experience. But causation is never external. It's not a popular position in the postmodern world, but we have to accept responsibility for who we are. The postmodern view that we are the sum of our formative experiences actually teaches us to create shadow by attributing cause outside ourself. The western religious teaching that everything happens for a reason does the same thing by teaching us to look at experiences as something other than what they are. And the new age law of attraction line that we attract our experience is an ugly mishmash of the two, and is intellectually tenuous at best.
We misinterpret because we misunderstand the truth that there is no "out there" out there. The world is experienced internally, and so there is no world outside awareness. Yes the world still exists; material fact is material fact. Matter is not an illusion of the mind; but it is experienced only through mind so it may as well be. As a result, the most charged experiences become formative in the sense that they cause us to define our perspective by choosing what to integrate and what to project into shadow. And we do that according to the methods we have been taught by our culture, our family, or religion, etc. (Those who should be teaching us not to create shadow in the first place...)
So the experience is not the discrete cause, and calling it such will not integrate the shadow, though accepting the experience can be part of reintegrating the shadow. The real problem with shadow is that it exists by deliberate misdirection; we lie to ourselves, we attribute causation to forces outside ourself in an attempt to escape responsibility for who we are. We take a bottom-up approach because it makes us feel like we are doing something without getting to the real hard issues -- the ones that force us to question our beliefs about ourselves. And because it's mind vs. mind, it is self-obscuring, self-preserving and resilient against numerous practices that claim to address the entire spectrum of human issues. But at the end of the day, it is only a fearless and impersonal approach to personal responsibility that will bring the shadow into the light.
