Facing the Shadow

We approach Independence Day, and we are a polarized country. Headlines scream out with vitriol, each side claim the moral high ground, tries to appear noble, right, and virtuous, while the other side is evil, lawbreaking, or stupid. It’s ugly. Pick either side and you can be self-righteous, feel like a victim, and point the finger at “them” … after all, they’re the problem.

When I turn toward Nature, the landscape – physical and moral – looks quite different. Life is whole, round, complete. It is yin and yang, up and down, night and day, creation and destruction. Nature moves in cycles. The expansion of summer capitulates to the constriction of fall; the dying back of winter yields to springtime’s resurrection. The polarities of life cannot be escaped, and it’s a dangerous illusion to think we can avoid them.

Nature is rife with shadow. Life is predatory. Everything has to eat, and in the act something else is eaten. Lions, wolves, rabbits, fungus, bacteria…. one form dies so another may live. The fox kills the chicken… the lion, the gazelle; the spider the fly. Cancer kills the host. Even the sheep tear up the grass. Good and evil are interwoven and vary by point of view. The fox’s gain is the chicken’s loss. We delude ourselves by denying that we participate in this cycle too.To assume that anyone can be good all the time is laughable. One can attempt to be against “evil” and seek “the light,” but refusing to acknowledge the shadow in ourselves ignores a great deal of who and what we are. This denial sets us against half of existence, against life, and makes us blind to our own dysfunction. When we turn our face away, the darkness within will still express itself, but it will leak or break out unconsciously, be far harder to see or control.

Nature is magnificent, intense, beautiful, sublime, but neither nice nor good. The warmth of summer fades into winter. Sunshine makes crops grow and life possible, but it sometimes turns hard and relentless until everything shrivels and dies. Rain soothes and makes fertile the parched soil; then floods rip it away and wash it downstream. Wholeness demands that we know our “other self,” the aspects we try to hide and deny.

Humans destroy indiscriminately. The notion that our species (race, religion, party, country, etc.) is special and better than the rest (so righteous!) is a mythology with no moral or scientific footing. To then insult, exploit, or try to destroy these others without consideration because they’re beneath us is morally pathetic. We inflict great suffering daily, damaging and destroying the earth and each other. Those attached to appearing right and righteous perpetuate the greatest evil — denying their own darkness and attacking others for all they refuse to acknowledge in themselves.An old Hassidic saying states, “God loves the wicked who know they’re wicked, far more than he loves the righteous who know they’re righteous.”

The assumption there’s a place of all good — like heaven — with a corresponding place of evil is an absurd and life-denying notion. Of course, this heaven can’t be found on earth, or even in life. It’s in an “after-life.”  These representations of torment and perfect harmony refer to states of awareness, not places in any physical universe. Heavens and hells are found in the psyche. They germinate and grow in the imagination and mind, fed by the way we think and perceive, and cultivated by our ability or inability to accept and love.

Facing and integrating our shadow is required to claim our wholeness. We must accept our unconscious or repressed impulses, our defects and unknowns. If we want to open our mind, senses, and hearts, if we want to feel and experience life fully, we must feel it all. One does not get to live only in the light, occupying just “virtuous” positions and emotions. Love comes with grief and loss; creation and destruction work side by side; terror and wonder are holding hands. To avoid what is difficult requires us to disconnect, repress, and numb ourselves to feeling and experience – to reality! — generally.

Joseph Campbell once remarked that “Every devil is just a god we haven’t recognized yet.”  Our labels of good and evil do not refer to facts in an objective world. It is our rejection and judgment itself, the refusal to shine the light on elements we don’t want to see that keeps them dark. The ancient world had no interest in abstract notions of perfection. It sought integration and completion, and integration involves recognizing, confronting, and accepting the shadow aspects of life

To become whole and authentic… to heal ourselves, we must become the wicked who know they’re wicked. If we can admit our faults, face our failings, and relinquish our self-importance and arrogance, we will take a small step on the road to participating in life with love and compassion.

Welcoming the rejected aspects back to the banquet table invites great healing. The shadow does not look pretty, but it contains great energy, emotion, and power. Vitality unexpressed turns dark, and the elements within us must be grappled with and befriended or they will remain demonic, coming out in ways we will not see. What we resist, persists. Wholeness comes through welcoming back and integrating what’s been excommunicated, and the power of what was formerly in shadow becomes part of our gift, its expression no longer outside our awareness or control.

… Let us “prey”…