The water of life, wishing to make itself known on the face of the earth, bubbled up in an artesian well and flowed without effort or limit. People came to drink of the magic water and were nourished by it, since it was so clean and pure and invigorating. But humankind was not content to leave things in this Edenic state. Gradually they began to fence the well, charge admission, claim ownership of the property around it, make elaborate laws as to who could come to the well, put locks on the gates. Soon the well was the property of the powerful and the elite. The water was angry and offended; it stopped flowing and began to bubble up in another place. The people who owned the property around the first well were so engrossed in their power systems and ownership that they did not notice that the water had vanished. They continued selling the nonexistent water, and few people noticed that the true power was gone. But some dissatisfied people searched with great courage and found the new artesian well. Soon that well was under the control of the property owners, and the same fate overtook it. The spring took itself to yet another place — and this has been going on throughout recorded history.
This is a very sad story, and Jung was particularly touched by it, since he saw how a basic truth can be misused and subverted into an egocentric plaything. Science, art, and particularly psychology have suffered from this dark process. But the wonder of the story is that the water is always flowing somewhere and is available to any intelligent person who has the courage to search out the living water in its current form.
The main difficulty is that it is to be found where one least expects it. This is the meaning of the biblical phrase “What good could come out of Nazareth?”
The persona is what we would like to be and how we wish to be seen by the world. It is our psychological clothing and it mediates between our true selves and our environment just as our physical clothing presents an image to those we meet. The ego is what we are and know about consciously. The shadow is that part of us we fail to see or know.
We all are born whole and, let us hope, will die whole. But somewhere early on our way, we eat one of the wonderful fruits of the tree of knowledge, things separate into good and evil, and we begin the shadow-making process; we divide our lives. In the cultural process we sort out our God-given characteristics into those that are acceptable to our society and those that have to put away. This is wonderful and necessary, and there would be no civilized behavior without this sorting out of good and evil. But the refused and unacceptable characteristics do not go away; they only collect in the dark corners of our personality. When they have been hidden long enough, they take on a life of their own — the shadow life. The shadow is that which has not entered adequately into consciousness. It is the despised quarter of our being. It often has an energy potential nearly as great as that of our ego. If it accumulates more energy than our ego, it erupts as an overpowering rage or some indiscretion that slips past us; or we have a depression or an accident that seems to have its own purpose. The shadow gone autonomous is a terrible monster in our psychic house.
The civilizing process, which is the brightest achievement of humankind, consists of culling out those characteristics that are dangerous to the smooth functioning of our ideals. Anyone who does not go through this process remains a “primitive” and can have no place in a cultivated society. We all are born whole but somehow the culture demands that we live out only part of our nature and refuse other parts of our inheritance. We divide the self into an ego and a shadow because our culture insists that we behave in a particular manner. This is our legacy from having eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden. Culture takes away the simple human in us, but gives us more complex and sophisticated power. One can make a forceful argument that children should not be subjected to this division too soon or they will be robbed of childhood; they should be allowed to remain in the Garden of Eden until they are strong enough to stand the cultural process without being broken by it. This strength comes at different ages for different individuals and it requires a keen eye to know when children are ready to adapt to the collective life of a society.
It is absolutely necessary to engage in the cultural process to redeem ourselves from our animal state; it is equally necessary to accomplish the spiritual task of putting our fractured, alienated world back together again. One must break away from the Garden of Eden but one must also restore the heavenly Jerusalem.
Generally, the first half of life is devoted to the cultural process — gaining one’s skill, raising a family, discipling one’s self in a hundred different ways; the second half of life is devoted to restoring the wholeness (making holy) of life. One might complain that this is a senseless round trip except that the wholeness at the end is conscious while it was unconscious and childlike at the beginning. This evolution, though it seems gratuitous, is worth all the pain and suffering that it costs. The only disaster would be getting lost halfway through the process and not finding our completion. Unfortunately, many Westerners are caught in just this difficult place.
Whenever we pluck the fruit of creativity from the golden tree our other hand plucks the fruit of destruction. Our resistance to this insight is very high! We would love to have creativity without destruction, but that is not possible.
I regret the prevailing attitude at present that goodness or sainthood consists of living as much as possible on the right hand, the good side, of the seesaw. Sainthood has been caricatured as an image of the all-right person, the person who has transferred everything to the perfect side of his personality. Such a condition would be completely unstable and would flip immediately. The balance would be disrupted and life would be impossible.
To act is to sin. To create is to destroy at the same time. We cannot make light without a corresponding darkness. India balances Brahma, the god of creation, with Shiva, the god of destruction, and Vishnu sits in the middle keeping the opposites together.
Long hour of concentrated attention gave him a very focused personality. But this was at the cost of ignoring the dark and primitive aspects that appeared in his dream. The more refined our conscious personality, the more shadow we have built up on the other side.
To own one’s own shadow is to reach a holy place — an inner center — not attainable in any other way. To fail this is to fail one’s own sainthood and to miss the purpose of life.
This is why so many artists are often so difficult in their private lives. There is, however, a broader kind of creativity that folds the darkness into the finished product and finds fulfillment in the shadow. This is pure genius. Its attributes are wholeness, health, and holiness.
Broader talents call up a greater portion of the dark. Schumann, the composer, went mad; the whole world knows about the very dark side of Picasso’s life; and everyone hears stories about local geniuses with their unusual habits.
I remember a weekend when I put up with very difficult guests who stayed days beyond their invitation. I exercised herculean patience and courtesy and sighed in great relief when they left. I thought I had earned something nice by my virtue so went to the nursery to buy something beautiful for my garden. Before I knew what was happening, I picked a fight with the nurseryman and made a miserable spectacle of myself. Since I did not pick up my shadow consciously, I landed it on this poor stranger. Balance was served, but in a clumsy and stupid way.
Worst of all, children often have to carry the dark side of creative parents. It is proverbial that the minister’s child will be difficult and the wealthy man’s child is in danger of leading a meaningless life.
A five-minute ceremony or acknowledgment of my shadow accumulation after my guests depart will have satisfied it and safeguarded my environment from darkness.
If I do not redress that imbalance quickly, I will soon be rude to someone, turn up a thoroughly nasty side of my character, or fall into a depression. The shadow will claim its dues in some form, intelligent or stupid.
Does this mean that I have to be as destructive as I am creative, as dark as I am light? Yes, but I have some control over how or where I will pay the dark price.
The Catholic Mass is a masterpiece of balancing our cultural life. If one has the courage to see, the Mass is full of the darkest things: there is incest, betrayal, rejection, torture, death — and worse. All this leads to revelation but not until the dark side has been portrayed as vividly as possible. If one went to Mass in high consciousness one would tremble at the awfulness of it — and be redeemed by its balancing effect. The Mass lost much of its effectiveness when it was modernized and made to serve the cultural process. One ought to be pale with terror at the Mass.
George Bernard Shaw said the only alternative to torture is art. This means we will engage in our creativity or have to face its alternative, brutality.
Any repair to our fractured world must start with individuals who have the insight and courage to own their own shadow. Nothing “out there” will help if the interior projecting mechanism of humankind is operating strongly. The tendency to see one’s shadow “out there” in one’s neighbor or in another race or culture is the most dangerous aspect of the modern psyche. It is not the monsters of the world who make such chaos but the collective shadow to which every one of us has contributed.
A horrible proverb states that every generation must have its war so that young men can taste the blood and chaos of the battlefield. Our armies and navies have a high place in our society and any parade or military band stars hot blood flowing in the veins of men, young and old. Though I consciously question warfare and its place in an intelligent society, I was not immune to that hot blood when I saw a detachment of the French foreign legion marching down the street with their colorful uniforms, their comraderie, and their jaunty song, and I would have given anything to join them. My own shadow had surfaced and for a moment hot blood completely overruled intelligence and thought.
It requires a sophisticated and disciplined society to fight a war as long and complicated as WW1 and WW2. Primitive people would have tired of their war in a few weeks and gone home.
Unless we do conscious work on it, the shadow is almost always projected; that is, it is neatly laid on someone or something else so we do not have to take responsibility for it. This is the way things were done five hundred years ago, and most of us are still stuck in this medieval consciousness. The medieval world was based on mutual shadow projection; it thrived on a fortress mentality, armor, walled cities, possession by force, ownership of anything feminine by male prerogative, royal patronage, and city-states in perpetual siege at each other’s gates. Medieval society was almost entirely ruled by patriarchal values that are famous for their one-sidedness. Even the Church took part in the shadow politics. Only the individuals whom we call saints (not all of them named or celebrated), the Benedictine monasteries, and some of the esoteric societies avoided the projecting game.
Today, whole businesses are devoted to containing our shadows for us. The movie industry, fashion designs, and novels provide us with easy places to invest our shadow. Newspapers offers us a daily allotment of disasters, crimes, and horrors to feed our shadow nature outwardly when it should be incorporated into each of us as a integral part of his own personality. We are left as less than whole personalities when we invest our own darkness into something outside ourselves. Projection is always easier than assimilation.
In old India each community chose a man to be the “bogey.” He was to be slaughtered at the end of the year and to take the evil deeds of the community with him. People were so grateful for this service that until his death the bogey was not required to do any work and could have anything he wanted. He was treated as a representative of the next world. Since he had the power of the collective shadow in him he was supremely powerful and feared.
My own father took refuge in invalidism and lived very little of his potential. As a result of this, I feel I have two lives to cope with — my own and the unlived life of my father. This is a severe burden, but it can have creative dimensions if I take on this task consciously. Such things are possible only when we are old enough and mature enough to know what we are doing — though we do not usually have this kind of wisdom until we reach middle age.
It is hard to overestimate the amount of suffering that is handed down from generation to generation. Harry Truman had a little sign on his desk while he was president: “The buck stops here.” We could give our children the most wonderful blessing if only we would stop passing the buck to them.
Heaping abuse does great damage — not only to others but to us as well, for as we project our shadow we give away an essential ingredient of our own psychology. We need to connect with this dark side for our own development, and we have no business flinging it at others, trying to palm off these awkward and unwanted feelings. The difficulty is that most of us live in an intricate web of shadow exchange that robs both parties of their potential wholeness. The shadow also contains a good deal of energy, and it is the cornerstone of our vitality. A very cultured individual with an equally strong shadow has a great deal of personal power. William Blake spoke about the need to reconcile these two parts of the self. He said we should to go heaven for form and to hell for energy — and marry the two. When we can face our inner heaven and our inner hell, this is the highest form of creativity.
Jung warned us that it would not be too difficult to get the skeletons out of the closet from a patient in analysis but it would be exceedingly difficult to get the gold out of the shadow. People are as frightened of their capacity for nobility as of their darkest sides. If you find the gold in someone he will resist it to the last ounce of his strength. This is why we indulge in hero-worship so often. It is much easier to admire a hero from afar than to be my own (lesser) version of those qualities.
So much energy lies wrapped up in the shadow. If we have exploited the ego and worn out our known capacities, our unused shadow can give us a wonderful new lease on life.
It comes as a great surprise to discover that the most powerful and valuable projection one ever makes is in falling in love. This too is a shadow projection and probably the most profound religious experience one is ever likely to have. Please remember that the shadow, in Jung’s early usage, was anything that lay in the unconscious part of one’s personality. Also remember that this discussion is about falling in love, not the act of loving.
To fall in love is to protect the most noble and infinitely valuable part of one’s being onto another human being, though sometimes under rare circumstances it may be projected onto something other than a human. There are people who put their divine capacity on a profession or art or even a place. Language is accurate in saying that such a person has fallen in love with medicine, the works of Picasso, or the Ojai Valley. Most of our examples, however, will be drawn from the experience of seeing our own image of divinity in another human being. To make this examination all the more difficult, we have to say that the divinity we see in others is truly there, but we don’t have the right to see it until we have taken away our own projections. How difficult! How can one say that the projection is not true but that the divinity of one’s beloved is? Making this fine differentiation is the most delicate and difficult task in life.
Romantic love, or falling in love, is different from loving, which is always a quieter and more humanly proportioned experience. There is always something overblown and bigger-than-life about falling in love.
To fall in love is to project that particularly golden part of one’s shadow, the image of God — whether masculine or feminine — onto another person. Instantly, that person is the carrier of everything sublime and holy. When in-loveness turns into its opposite, there is nothing more bitter in human experience. Most marriages in the West begin with a projection, go through a period of disillusionment, and, God willing, become more human. That is to say, they come to be based on the profound reality that is the other person. While in-loveness is close proximity to God, love based on reality serves our humble condition far better.
Though no one notices at the time, in-loveness obliterates the humanity of the beloved. One does a curious kind of insult to another by falling in love with him, for we are really looking at our own projection of God, not at the other person. If one person is in love and the other not, the cooler one is likely to say, “We would have something better between us if you would look at me rather than at your image of me.”
A middle-aged husband and wife confront one another with the words, “Well, who took the magic out of it?” True, when the projection of in-loveness is exhausted, the other side of reality — and the very dark possibilities in human exchange — take over. If we can survive this, then we have human love — far less exciting than divine love, but far more stable.
The shadow is very important in marriage, and we can make or break a relationship depending on how conscious we are of this. We forget that in falling in love, we must also come to terms with what we find annoying and distasteful — even downright intolerable — in the other and also in ourselves. Yet it is precisely this confrontation that leads to our greatest growth.
I will give you an identity and make the world see you as an extension of myself.
I will be compliant and sweet, but underneath I will have the real control. If anything goes wrong, I will take your money and your house.
When we project our God image on our mates, that is just as dangerous as projecting our darkness, fear, and anxiety. We say to the beloved, “I expect you to give me divine inspiration, to be the sole source of my creativity. I give you the power to transform my life.” In this way, we ask the beloved to do what our spiritual disciplines have done in the past: make us new, redeem us, save our souls.
Nearly every modern novel addresses our powerful motivation to fall in love — or the anguish of broken or unrequited love. For better or for worse, modern humanity has the power of romance. At best, it is the highest faculty of the human race; at worst, it is probably the most painful experience known to us.
No ordinary human container can ever survive the impact of 10,000 volts. Yet our culture prescribes this 10,000-volt experience as the basis for very marriage. When marriages survive, it is because both partners have moved down to the 110-volt human level and learned the art of loving.
Love, in its human proportions, is far more valuable than the leap-into-the-heavens experience of romance.
Owning the power that lies in our shadow is a particularly challenging task. We can’t own it in the sense of possessing it, for the ego is far too small a container and will inflate out of hand. If one were to possess it, one would likely announce that he was God or, equally outlandish, that God was dead. Nietzsche came perilously close to this and paid for it with his sanity. To project this power is to burden another person with superhuman characteristics that are impossible to bear. It remains for our religious life to find a way to come to terms with this great superpersonal power.
The ancient world had no illusions about romance; they knew that these feelings came, fleetingly, as a gift from the gods. There was less inflation here: humans were only carriers of divine energy. Today when this energy is bestowed on us, we need a ritual of thanksgiving to contain it, and a way of returning it to its rightful source.
Every human experience can be expressed in terms of paradox. The electric plug in the wall has two prongs, access to a positive and negative electrical charge. From this opposition comes the usefulness of the electric current. Day is incomprehensible only in contrast to night. Masculinity has relevance only in contrast to femininity. Activity has meaning only in relation to rest. Taste is a matter of contrasts. Up is only possible in the presence of down. What would north be without south? Where would I be without you? Where is joy not bounded by sobriety?
For some incomprehensible reason we often refuse this paradoxical nature of reality and, in an idiot moment, think we can function outside of it. The very moment we do this, we translate paradox into opposition. When leisure is torn loose from work, both are spoiled. Personal suffering begins when we are crucified between these opposites. If we try to embrace one without paying tribute to the other, we degrade paradox into contradiction. Yet both pairs of opposites must be equally honored. To suffer one’s confusion is the first step in healing. Then the pain of contradiction is transformed into the mystery of paradox.
There are three occasions for true happiness in human beings. The first is a surplus of energy. The second is the cessation of pain. The third is the absolute certainty that one is doing the will of God. The first is the province of youth. The second lasts only for a brief moment. The third is to be won by virtue of much work — inner work. If one has progressed past the duality of life, one has come to the absolute certainty that one is doing the will of God. This is the joy that every one of us knows to be our true heritage and that haunts us or inspires us as the goal of life.
It is good to win; it is also good to lose. It is good to have; it is also good to give to the poor. Freedom is good; so is the acceptance of authority. To view the elements of our life in this paradoxical manner is to open up a whole new series of possibilities. To stay loyal to paradox is to earn the right to unity.
Probably the most trouble some pair of opposites to reconcile is love and power. Our modern world is torn to shreds by this dichotomy and one finds many more failures than successes in the attempt to reconcile them.
Power without love becomes brutal; love without power is insipid and weak. Yet when two people get close to each other, there is generally an explosion in their lives. Most of the recrimination between quarreling lovers or spouses involves the collision of power and love. To give each its due and endure the paradoxical tension is the noblest of all tasks.
Fanaticism is always a sign that one has adopted one of a pair of opposites at the expense of the other. The high energy of fanaticism is a frantic effort to keep one half of the truth at bay while the other half takes control. This always yields a brittle and unrentable personality. This kind of righteousness depends on “being right.” We may want to hear what the other is saying, but be afraid when the balance of power starts to shift. The old equation is collapsing and you are sure that you will lose yourself if you “give in.” And how the ego works to keep the status quo! In this event, one must put some faith in transcendence — and have the courage to sacrifice a point of view for the sake of the relationship.
Someone once said that Shakespeare could take the roof off any house and find an immortal drama. Take the roof off any human life and one will find the paradoxes that are the preparation for a religious life, a vision of that which is greater than the personal. Conflict to paradox to revelation; that is the divine progression.
When the unstoppable bullet hits the impenetrable wall, we find the religious experience. It is precisely here that one will grow. Jung once said, “Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next.”
Don’t just do something. Stand there.
When thinking of the anima as the soul guide, we are apt to think of Beatrice leading Dante up to Paradise, but we would not forget that he experienced that only after he had gone through Hell. Normally, the anima does not take a man by the hand and lead him right up to Paradise; she puts him first into a hot cauldron where he is nicely roasted for a while.
It takes a poet — or the poet in us — to overlap such a pair and make a sublime whole of them.
Will we make it? If enough people will do their inner work. This soul work is the one thing that will pull us through any emergency.
Guilt is a total waste of time and energy. I used to tease my Baptist grandmother, telling her guilt was a sin. She would get very angry since I was depriving her of her favorite pastime. She thought she was not doing her duty to Jesus if she were not wringing her hands in guilt after her sinful condition. Guilt creates nothing; conscious work constructs a mandorla and is healing. The mandorla has no place for remorse. It asks conscious work of us, not self-indulgence.
Guilt is also a cheap substitute for paradox. The energy consumed by guilt would be far better invested in the courageous act of looking at two sets of truths that have collided in our personality. Guilt is also arrogant because it means we have taken sides in an issue and are sure that we are right.