ne of the most prevailing cultural notions of our time, perhaps of any time, is that the individual is torn between good and bad. That we must reject our foul impulses and move forward with goodness instead. But what if this isn't true? What if these foul impulses are not just poison and waste, but instead great reserves of gold?

More broadly, it may be true that this entire division, this idea that some qualities are bad while others are good, is complete nonsense. This clumsy categorization of our feelings does not lead us towards peace, but instead into a forever and unwinnable war. This is a war that wreaks havoc of all sizes, from the grandest brutalities humanity has ever witnessed to the most minute interactions of a person's daily life. But thankfully, it is a war we can choose not to fight. There is a better way to be.

What is the Shadow?

Carl Gustaf Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and psychologist who lived from 1875 to 1961. Throughout his life, he developed a number of theories and ideas about the human condition. One of these was the identification of the persona, ego, and shadow. What follows is certainly a simplification of Jung's work, but it is honest enough that we may proceed.

For Jung, the persona is essentially how we present ourselves to the world. It is not always false, but it is certainly not whole either. The persona is a role that we play to satisfy our own desires and those of our world. It is a sort of compromise between the individual and the world around them. If you are in a group of friends who want to see a movie which does not interest you, your persona may incline you to be polite and see the film without a fuss.

The ego is perhaps a slightly more whole version of ourselves. It is how we self-identify. It is the lens through which we internally understand the world around us. The ego has access to memories, thoughts, opinions, and desires which we may sometimes not incorporate into our persona. The ego is important. It helps us to process and mediate the outside world. It gives us our conscious sense of identity. In our previous example of seeing the movie, your ego is represented by the internal thought of "I am not interested in that movie."

And then there is the shadow. It may not be fair to call the shadow the most complex of these pieces, but it is certainly the hardest to access and even understand. Your shadow is the unconscious parts of your personality. It is the collection of traits, motivations and desires which you or culture at large has deemed unsavory. In the shadow, we find traits like laziness, cruelty, manipulation, greed, selfishness, etc. When confronted with the movie example, our shadow may be the part of us which says people who do want to see that movie are stupid or simple. The shadow is typically so hard repressed that we do not even realize its existence, or more accurately, we attempt not to recognize that existence. And herein lies the problem.

The Forever Shadow

Although the shadow side of ourselves may seem undesirable or wicked, it is regardless a part of ourselves. We cannot not have a shadow. We are born whole with all of our potential qualities mixed up into one pot. The very second we begin to interface with the world, the shadow making process begins. We learn what behaviors and feelings are acceptable within our culture and we attempt to repress those which are not. As Robert A. Johnson has noted in his book, "Owning Your Own Shadow", the division of ourselves into our shadow is a rather arbitrary process. In some cultures, individualism is seen as a grand quality. Others impress the importance of fitting in. Some cultures praise artists, others praise men of science. There are many cultural idiosyncrasies like these. This is not inherently bad. Without this kind of process for the individual, the world would not have culture. The world may not even have civilization. But this process does have the tendency to lead us down a dangerous path.

As we sort qualities into the shadow category containig things like: Greed, Pride, Lust, Revenge, Sloth, Cruelty, Indulgence or Jealousy, the world and ourselves declare these things to have no value. They are better to be destroyed than investigated in some abstract vacuous reality. Perhaps this is true. It would be nice if no one had the capability for evil or cruelty. But this just isn't how humanity works. We will always have a shadow. These qualities will always exist. No matter what we do, we all have selfish thoughts, cruel ideas, and heartless feelings within us. No matter how much we believe these things to be harmful, even our dearest virtues themselves have shadows. Johnson notes:

"Humility can make us overly obedient and can produce volumes of repressed resentment. It may too inspire a performative, holier-than-thou streak about our humility."

A vice like pride is seen by some as a bad thing, but pride too can inspire us to reach further, to achieve beyond what we are currently doing. Pride can even shield us from undue suffering. Confronted with cruelty, pride can tell us that we do not deserve that sort of treatment.

Furthermore, every action we take in life, no matter how virtuous, has some negative impact upon the world. This is the shadow in practice.

A baby requires nourishment, and nourishment is good. But to do so, the baby cries and annoys a room full of people. We plunge ourselves into work to create or do something good, but this is at the expense of other parts of our lives. We love an individual and thereby sacrifice time with other people who may also deserve love. We donate money to help the rainforest, but now we are choosing not to donate money to help feed starving children. If an artist creates something dark, they are being pessimistic in introducing pain into the world. Maybe this is bad, but if an artist creates something light and jovial, they are pushing aside important, painful truths that humanity should certainly recognize. This is also a bad thing to do.

All of these exist in proportion. The greater the creation or deed, the longer its shadow. The more energy we put into A, the more we neglect B. The kinder we are to person Y, the less kindness we give to person X. This is a difficult truth because it is one we cannot simply opt out of. Imagine a person tries to do this. A person decides to do absolutely nothing in life, fearing the negative consequences of even the kindest deeds. The person spends every minute of their 80-something years staring at a white wall in inaction. Well, they too are casting a shadow. Perhaps they are protecting the world from their potential cruelty, but they are also refusing the world their kindness. They are keeping their gifts in hibernation and doing a disservice via this inaction.

The shadow also exists outside of the individual. There is a collective shadow. Society has advanced. Technology has helped us in so many ways while destroying so much. Beneficial technology abounds, but arguments can be made against all of them. Use of resources, distraction from other causes, etc. We live in an era of great peace, but as this peace has grown, so has economic dominance and horrendous wealth disparities between developed and smaller nations. So the question is not how do we destroy these shadows but what do we do with them given that they are a fundamental part of our collective and individual existences.

Repressing The Shadow

Unfortunately, the most common approach is repression. The farcical idea that we can simply not deal with our undesirable qualities and thereby eliminate them. Of course, taking this path has consequences. One of the most common of these is shadow projection. This is what occurs when instead of doing the much harder, more stressful work of recognizing it within ourselves, we force others to bear the weight of our shadow. On an individual level, we feast on the sufferings of others. We crave violent media or news stories which really do nothing to benefit ourselves other than ostensibly give us a place to direct our shadow. This may seem harmless, but it doesn't really satisfy the shadow. Instead, it teases the shadow and encourages us to get these quick hits of human pain.

When repressed, our shadow also lashes out. We say things we do not mean. We get caught in fits of rage. We engage in unplanned moments of attack on other individuals that we generally regret quite quickly. Parents may put their shadow onto their children through emotional or physical abuse, thus sowing the seed of that same behavior when the child matures. The tricky thing is that one man's shadow is like fire where the next is gasoline. When we pour our shadow onto another man, his too is ignited and so conflict can abound. Consider two adult people who get into a fight. It is almost universally true that neither of these individuals is entirely sensible. It is a case of having a poor relationship with their own shadow.

We also see our repressed shadow everywhere but ourselves. We take note of the qualities we hate the most in other people and resent them on these grounds. This is unfortunate. We may be choosing to reject a positive relationship based on just one or two rather minute observations or lack of understanding by not giving the person enough time to explain. But the qualities we dislike in other people, we find distasteful precisely because we know that we possess them ourselves. When we see these undesirable traits, this serves as an unwelcome reminder that we too have similar qualities tucked away somewhere. It is far easier to cast off sources of these reminders than to investigate the darker sides of ourselves.

There are two broader, more large-scale consequences of a population repressing the shadow. We lay our shadows onto other people, even groups of people. A nation or population's actions result in some undesirable consequences. Rather than self-examination, that population finds others to convict. Rather than addressing their own darkness, they hoist it upon others and cause suffering. The examples of this are almost endless. Nazis and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, whites and blacks, men and women. This tendency mirrors our own individual shadow projection. When we lash out at someone, we know that it is the wrong course of action. But our repression causes us to override our values and more coherent thoughts. When a population inflicts suffering on another group, they likely all individually understand that it is wrong to make someone suffer. But their shadow projection overrides this knowledge.

So when we repress our shadows, we end up with one or both of two things. On an individual level, we abdicate our responsibility for ourselves and we refuse an opportunity to understand who we are and to move closer to a harmonious life. In a broader form, we enact violence and hatred on the world which is undeserving of this burden.

We like to consider ourselves, as Robert Johnson notes, as two pieces of some hole in conflict. We are good and bad, and we must strive for the good to win out over the bad. This is an idea which has been impounded upon us endlessly by classic and contemporary pieces of media. But we cannot truly eliminate these alleged bad qualities, our shadow. So the very best-case scenario, the only end for seeing ourselves in this constant conflict is a forever war.

So what can we do instead?

As Robert Johnson notes in his book, the medieval hero had to go slay his dragons. But our shadow is a kind of dragon that cannot be slain. So the modern man must adopt it, must care for it, must even nurture it so that it remains livable. Of course, the first step to doing this is simply knowing that the dragon exists. Where would our medieval knight be without even knowing about the dragon in the cave?

## Gold in The Shadow

We must understand that the shadow is not bad. In fact, it is great. It is a profound source of truth. It is the closest thing to our true selves that we have. It is like a highlighter for the soul. Opposites justify each other's existences. Consider day without night, happiness without sadness, work without leisure. All of these things become meaningless without their counterparts. Why should this not apply to ourselves?

Say a person considers themselves to be kind, but their shadow often presents them with malevolent or cruel thoughts. As Johnson notes, we are very quick to chalk this up to mere contradiction, opposing forces. But contradiction is a dead end. It is not productive. It is a conclusion not a explantion. Instead, we may examine these contrasting qualities as paradoxical. As paradoxes, they seem meaningless at first glance, but are in truth a meadow of nourishment. This type of idea is difficult to understand. It is quite easy to just declare that we are warring in some way. But it is much more challenging to recognize each side of this conflict as being important and meaningful. In truth, these paradoxes are what make us whole and good. A person is not kind because they have no cruel thoughts. They are kind because they elect to act upon their kind thoughts. A person is good because they could be bad.

This is where the shadow has its gold in enabling our capacity for goodness and positivity and allowing the mere concept of goodness to even exist. Perhaps unfortunately, this is also where the truly paradoxical nature of the shadow comes to fruition.

Qualities which we may see as bad should not be simply vanquished by those we see as good. It is good to win, but it is also good to lose. It is good to accumulate resources, but it is also good to donate to those in need. It is positive to work hard, but it is important to be lazy as well.

This is what the shadow is about on its most fundamental level: reframing the very essence of how we categorize our thoughts, ourselves, doing away with duality and instead considering that all of our feelings exist in one giant pool with none being more truthful than any other. Living with the shadow is a difficult journey. It is not impossible, but it is difficult. And when we look further into perhaps humanity's most intense sensation, we find where one difficulty may lie.

Love & Hate

Jung's idea of the shadow developed throughout his life. In its earliest stages, the shadow was not only our undesirable qualities. It was anything held in our unconscious. Those things we feel or desire or value that we are not aware of. When we take this idea of the shadow arrested in Jung's early interpretation, we find it can, does, and will apply to the most profound of all human emotions, love.

This isn't just the romantic love of a person. This could be a hobby, a place, a job, or anything which a person falls in love with. When we fall in love with this thing or person, we project an image of God onto them. Not the Christian or Islamic or Hindu God, of course, but instead our most ideal version of any entity we could ever imagine. This sort of perfection is found in our shadow selves. Typically, we do not waltz through the world with a checklist of items that a thing or person must have for us to fall in love with them. Instead, we fall into love based on a more complicated cocktail which is born from our unconscious. People do not plan to fall in love. They just do. It just happens. When we do fall in love, we can hoist a tremendous burden onto that thing, place or person. We declare that it or they have become our inspiration, our reason for living, the veritable locomotive of our souls. Our whole life hitherto has powered forward based on our own spiritual and mental machinations. But now we expect that from some other entity or person.

This is dangerous and even cruel because that love is based not on the true subject of our love. Instead, it is the projection of our "God-image" or idealized version onto that person, place, or thing. We too often do not fall in love with some subject, but our idea of them, our interpretation of them. For a time, this may work, but it is not stable or sustainable.

Consider a person who takes a vacation to some Caribbean paradise. Within a few days, the person falls madly in love with this place and thus decides to move there permanently. When the person arrives, this inloveness is red-hot and the individual is immersed in this intense sensation. But days go by, then weeks, then months. The drudgeries of life begin to emerge. These sweltering summers reveal themselves to be unbearable. The island's location means groceries and basic necessities are exponentially more expensive than the person's previous home. A lack of infrastructure makes even the most mundane errands into ordeals and mild emergencies become perilous. Suddenly, this Caribbean paradise does not inspire us. It is not the locomotive of our souls. It is instead the object of our disdain and constant annoyance.

As Robert Johnson suggests, we have put an enormous amount of power and responsibility into something which cannot possibly accommodate it. The result is an absolute catastrophe which destroys the love we once felt. If this place we love is instead a person, our God image, our heavenly love, may now even destroy that individual.

So like with any other thing which falls into the shadow, we must contemplate, consider, and be honest with this love. It is not invalid, nor is it inherently bad. But we must know what to do with it, how to handle it in a way which is sustainable, even if that may not seem as glamorous as a whirlwind romance. Instead of projecting our God image onto the subject of our love, we should seek to earnestly understand that subject. We must acknowledge its true identity. We must reckon with what it really is, not what our shadow proclaims it to be.

This is all fine and good, but hitherto we have not exactly determined how to really wrangle one's shadow. This is because the true key to understanding and living with the shadow is part of a much larger picture.

The Whole Person

One of Jung's core principles was individuation. This is a hugely complicated idea, but in short, individuation is the process of a person synthesizing the many aspects of the mind into a complete, balanced, and honest human being. We should also understand what individuation is not. It is not rejecting all outside forces but knowing what to do with them. It is not acting on all of one's impulses, but understanding why they occur. The individuation process should not be confused with rather shallow concepts of self-help often seen in advertisments. Through individuation, as author Bud Harris notes, the person does not seek to merely have more positive thoughts or write some self-prescribed wrong and move on with life. Individuation is truly meaningfully being yourself. It is both a transformation and an unending process. We are forever caterpillars, forever cocooned and forever butterflies all at once. In our early childhood, we begin to make decisions and form values. We arrive knowingly or otherwise at conclusions about who we should be, how we should go through life, and what we should strive for. This often involves embracing certain qualities and trying to destroy others. There's not much we can do about this. Formative years are formative years. But when we get deeper into our lives, it becomes clear that this process having taken place so early is a problem. We reached conclusions about ourselves and our life before ourselves have lived. Imagine a person tells you to get ready for a hike in a faraway land.

Your first question would of course be, "Where is this land? What is the weather? What is the topography? Are we hiking the mountains of Appalachia, the snowy forests of Sweden, the savannah of Africa?" The person refuses to answer, but informs you to pack for the hike regardless. Of course, the result would be catastrophic. This is a microcosm for our lives, for so much of our development happening before we have truly experienced any part of the world. So, one way or another, it all implodes eventually. This can manifest in many ways. Perhaps a person goes through a midlife crisis or an individual may feel as if they have it all, money, a family, a career, etc., but still find themselves profoundly unhappy. It could even occur quite early in life. A college graduate earns their degree and enters the workforce only to feel tremendously unsatisfied with their choices. Choices which the world told them were objectively correct.

As far as I can tell, in any of these instances, that person did absolutely nothing wrong. They just lived. They did their earnest best. But suddenly the individual exists in a state of pure conflict or war. This is a state of tremendous imbalance. It is precisely this state which reminds us the value of individuation. Unfortunately, this process does not have a prescriptive or step-by-step process. It is far too complex and subjective. But individuation does have an anatomy.

Becoming Whole

A crucial piece of individuation is fully engaging with life. This is a vague notion certainly, but it is meaningful. We must seek all of those things which life has to offer, not only those which our ego, our persona has previously found desirous. Often those things are desirous because they eliminate some perceived level of strife or badness. But we must understand that defeat, suffering and failure are vital parts of the human condition. They are required to live a full life.

The things our ego and persona incline us to do can often be categorized as false doing. As Harris has noted, this is the act of pursuing things which really are fruitless. It is certainly important to have leisure. Leisure has tremendous value. But false doings are those activities which live up to the expectations of others or of our past preconceived notions of what could make us happy.

They may also take the form of quick self-help style fixes. These false doings are the hollow achievements which have typically brought us to our point of conflict in the first place. These false doings form a limited idea about life which is based on control. This limited idea tells us that we can simply control our emotions and moods and lives by making coherent intellectual choices. We can find this control-based ideology across many swaths of personal enrichment media. Self-help books, gurus, even ostensibly more mystical ideas like manifestation teach that we can control the world around us and mold it to suit our needs. Though yes, it still has its merits, our life is not so simple. Being a human for that matter is not so simple. We must not forget the power of simple acceptance. We can say yes to our feelings, thoughts, and even circumstances. We can work with the world and with ourselves instead of fighting some endless unwinnable war. We can accept, embrace, and harness those winds of our lives which push us across the sea. To do this, we must simply return home. We must understand that like plants grow from their roots, we too grow and expand from our most original selves. This idea is difficult because it is quite abstract. It is tremendously subjective. Unlike six-step protocols, learning about oneself is a forever process which requires intense spiritual labor.

A crucial piece of this labor is dismantling those things you feel so assured about. Consider first what are you beholden to? Is it the values instilled upon you by your parents? Although well-intentioned and not always misled, these things can become problems when imprinted upon a person. Your parents are from a different time, a different generation, and most fundamentally they are simply not you.

We also have what Harris refers to as cultural parents. That is those values and desires a culture impresses into a person. Again, these are not always entirely useless. But we must not make the assumption that they are in line with our individual desires and values. Humans want to be happy and we want to be loved. Once again, we have worthwhile pursuits which can paradoxically lead us astray. As we quest for happiness, we do the disservice of ignoring the true reality of our experiences. We reject feelings of defeat, terror, hurt, and suffering. But we must embrace these things if we are to understand who we truly are. If we are to see what we are capable of in our darkest hours, it is through this understanding that we can come to see failures as not leading us off course but giving us opportunity to see what we can accomplish.

We can realize our pains and darkness and thus recognize that we have surmounted them. We have done so perhaps with the aid of some people, but the aphorism of leading a horse to water does come to mind. We have surmounted difficulties through the incredible support and capability that we have within ourselves. Even the worst impulses again could present some value. Cruelty and revenge can be the desire to stand up for oneself or to act upon some conviction boldly. Greed may be the search for the bettering of one's life. The idea of being loved is a form of dependence. We think that to be loved, we must be accepted and understood. But this is just our idealization of love. Instead, perhaps we would be better to seek not a fictional ideal, but a real whole vision of love. Some people will reject us or dislike us based on qualities we hold. And that is perfectly okay. By knowing ourselves, we can find a truer version of interpersonal connection of love itself. One which has strong roots in a whole balanced individual. After all, it is better to be loved for what you are than to be loved for what you pretend to be.

We must understand that we are not trying to win a conflict, but to find balance. Consider, as Johnson proposes, your soul as a seesaw. All of our qualities exist on the seesaw and none of them can be removed.

So what must be done?

Well, we must equally distribute and tend to every item and put everything in its place so that the seesaw remains in balance. The ideal for our seesaw is not some lopsided immovable state, but instead a perfect equilibrium. By conversing with, meditating upon and nurturing our shadows, we can achieve this balance.

Debts and Duality

My work and life wade very often into what one may categorize as dark or melancholy, some may say. It is on the grounds of Jung's shadow that I reject this kind of notion. Stories of struggle and suffering are not miserable aberrations in the human condition. Perhaps they are not miserable at all. Imagine you are building a shed and a friend asks you if a hammer is good. This question would strike you as simply bizarre, as nonsensical. A hammer may be good if you have a nail that needs hammering, but if you have a screw, then certainly a hammer is not good. And so we see that a hammer is not good and a hammer is not bad. This sort of duality is basically nonsense.

So too are the various conditions of humanity. Most certainly we will not find true peril in discussing pain, but instead where catastrophe lies is in the rejection of it outright. Both the broadest and most individual forms of humanity owe to itself many things and among those things is balance. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you the individual how to find this balance in any kind of sequential method. Nobody can. If these kinds of issues had such easy answers, they would not be issues at all. Speaking for myself, I am leagues away from achieving the grand balance of my own seesaw.

But I can say this.

Those people that we care for, we are willing to accept and deal with their flaws. It seems odd that we would not offer ourselves that same kindness.

On Carl G. Jung - Kacper Patryk Sobczak

Sources:

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- Murray Stein - Jung's Map of the Soul
- Jolande Szekacs Jacobi - The Way of Individuation
- Bud Harris - Becoming Whole
- Robert A. Johnson - Owning Your Own Shadow
- Connie Zweig, Jeremiah Abrams - Meeting the Shadow

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