The Enemy Are Us

Posted on by kay

You know what's really depressing? Feeling like it's your job to spread the word about the human shadow.

This must be how exactly those Dr. Oz guys feel. They say the same things over and over — eat less bad fat and sugar, eat more good fat and fiber, get more exercise, get more rest, turn off the TV, go play outside, blah blah blah — while of course most of us stay just as unhealthy and out-of-shape as we ever were. But those guys are doctors. They feel like they have to keep saying it. So they do keep saying it. Every week, every article, every TV show… (At least they get paid for repeating themselves.)

So here I am, talking about the human shadow again: (but not getting paid)

Rather than acting like we don't know why in hell such grisly things keep happening all over the world — which will never stop them from happening — why don't we admit that we really do know.

Why don't we go ahead and admit that it's our own obsession with power and explosions and guns and graphically portrayed violence, multiplied by how many weak-minded people there are in the world.

We fly drone bombers. We wage wars and topple regimes in other countries for bad reasons. We fund munitions factories, but we don't fund schools and teachers. We let our children play — play — with deadly weapons, and with simulations of attacks on others with deadly weapons. We allow things which are absolutely sub-human to flourish on the internet, where any fool can access them.

We are responsible for the effect of our actions. And we are also responsible for becoming as aware as we can of these effects. — Rollo May

We may be living in the Land of Chup

Posted on by kay

"In the land of Chup, a Shadow very often has a stronger personality than the Person, or Self, or Substance to whom or to which it is joined! So often the Shadow leads, and it is the Person or Self or Substance that follows. And of course there can be quarrels between the Shadow and the Substance or Self or Person; they can pull in opposite directions–how often have I witnessed that!–but just as often there is a true partnership, and mutual respect.

–So Peace with the Chupwalas means Peace with their Shadows, too…

[The bad guy in the story] has become more Shadowy, so his Shadow has become more like a Person. And the point has come at which it's no longer possible to tell which is his Shadow and which is his substantial Self–because he has done what no other Chupwala has ever dreamt of–that is, he has separated himself from his Shadow! He goes about in the darkness, entirely Shadowless, and his Shadow goes wherever it wishes."

—Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie, Penguin Books, 1990, p132.

Sacrifice and Bliss

Posted on by kay

Seems kind of appropriate to quote from the "Sacrifice and Bliss" chapter of The Power of Myth as Easter approaches…

 

Bill Moyers: When I listen to you talk about how myths connect us to our sacred places, and how landscapes connected primal human beings to the universe, I begin to think that the supernatural, at least as you understand it, is really only the natural.

Joseph Campbell: The idea of the supernatural as being something over and above the natural is a killing idea. In the Middle Ages this was the idea that finally turned that world into something like a wasteland, a land where people were living inauthentic lives, never doing a thing they truly wanted to because the supernatural laws required them to live as directed by their clergy. In a wasteland, people are fulfilling purposes that are not properly theirs, but have been put upon them as inescapable laws. This is a killer…

Our story of the Fall in the Garden sees nature as corrupt, and that myth corrupts the whole world for us. Because nature is thought of as corrupt, every spontaneous act is sinful and must not be yielded to. You get a totally different civilization and a totally different way of living according to whether your myth presents nature as fallen or whether nature is in itself a manifestation of divinity, and the spirit is the revelation of the divinity that is inherent in nature.

…The act of nature itself has to be realized in the acts of life. In the hunting cultures, when a sacrifice is made, it is, as it were, a gift or a bribe to the deity that is being invited to do something for us or to give us something. But when a figure is sacrificed in the planting cultures, that figure itself is the god. The person who dies is buried and becomes the food. Christ is crucified, and from his body the food of the spirit comes.

The Christ story involves a sublimination of what originally was a very solid vegetal image. Jesus is on the Holy Rood, the tree, and he is himself the fruit of the tree. Jesus is the fruit of eternal life, which was on the second forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden. When man ate of the fruit of the first tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he was expelled from the Garden. The Garden is the place of unity, of nonduality of male and female, good and evil, God and human beings. You partake of that duality, and you are on the way out. The tree of coming back to the Garden is the tree of immortal life, where you know that I and the Father are one.

Getting back into that Garden is the aim of many a religion. When Yahweh threw man out of the Garden, he put two cherubim at the gate, with a flaming sword between. Now, when you approach a Buddhist shrine, with the Buddha seated under the tree of immortal life, you will find at the gate two guardians–those are the cherubim–and you're going between them to the tree of immortal life. In the Christian tradition, Jesus on the cross is on a tree, the tree of immortal life, and he is the fruit of the tree. Jesus on the cross, the Buddha under the tree–these are the same figures. And the cherubim at the gate? Who are they? At the Buddhist shrines you'll see one has his mouth open, the other has his mouth closed–fear and desire, a pair of opposites. If you're approaching a garden like that, and those two figures there are real to you and threaten you, if you have fear for your life, you are still outside the Garden. But if you are no longer attached to your ego existence, but the the ego existence as a function of a larger, eternal totality, and you favor the larger against the smaller, then you won't be afraid of those two figures, and you will go through.

We're kept out of the Garden by our own fear and desire in relation to what we think to be the goods of life.

Moyers: Have all men at all times felt some sense of exclusion from an ultimate reality, from bliss, from delight, from perfection, from God?

Campbell: Yes, but then you also have moments of ecstasy. The difference between everyday living and living in those moments of ecstasy is the difference between being outside and inside the Garden.

The Power of Myth, Moyers interviewing Campbell, edited by Betty Sue Flowers, Doubleday, 1988, p. 98-107

Using Language Carefully

Posted on by kay

In A Little Book on the Human Shadow, the National Book Award-winning poet, storyteller, and all around troublemaker Robert Bly tells us that using language carefully is one of the best ways to keep from spewing our shadow material and our projections on others wherever we go.

I haven't read that book in several years, but it must've sunk in further than I know, because the other way I woke up thinking

Strive for

more accuracy

with

less judgment.

So I wrote the phrase down and put it up over the kitchen sink, where I've been forced to stare at it ever since. Strive for more accuracy with less judgment. Humph.

We are all products of a black/white, either/or, right/wrong system of thinking. Which, as far as the range of human interaction actually goes, is about like trying to cram a large square peg into a small round hole. It's too limiting for ease or comfort, much less accuracy. And women, in particular, are groomed to say things for effect. We're trained to exaggerate, to stand out in a crowd. Men jump up and touch the awning. Women embellish.

Consider: I could say about my grandson, "He won't eat anything but fruit!" Or I could say about my grandson, "He really seems to be enjoying fruit these days."

The first statement locks him into a certain course of action. (And of course lets me off the hook about trying to get a balanced diet into the kid.)

The second statement allows him to experiment with fruit now, and then change and grow into enjoying other foods later.

The first statement sounds sort of whining and accusing, and it hands more power over to the baby than he's actually equipped to handle at such a young age.

The second statement simply says what is, without saying anything else.

Interesting.

 

 

the evil I fail to acknowledge within myself

Posted on by kay

More from Edward C. Whitmont. We're on page 162 now. He's still talking about projection.

"In each case that element (the relevant shadow issue) is something which the person is least willing to consider as part of his own personality make-up.

This type of situation is so classical that one could almost play a parlor game with it — if one wished to court social ruin. 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 other people. 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 in others 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.

The shadow is the archetypal experience of the "other fellow," who in his strangeness is always suspect. It is the archetypal urge for a scapegoat, for someone to blame and attack in order to vindicate oneself and be justified; it is the archetypal experience of the enemy, the experience of blame-worthiness which always adheres to the other fellow, since we are under the illusion of knowing ourselves and of having already dealt adequately with our own problems. In other words, to the extent that I have to be right and good, he, she or they become the carriers of all the evil which I fail to acknowledge within myself." — The Symbolic Quest, Edward C. Whitmont, Princeton University Press, 1969, p. 162.

Telling fact from fancy

Posted on by kay

This is from The Symbolic Quest, by Edward C. Whitmont, Princeton University Press, 1969, p.161:

"Projection {of our own shadow material} invariably blurs our own view of the other person. Even when the projected qualities happen to be real qualities of the other person…

Imagine an automobile driver who wears spectacles of red glass. He would find it difficult to tell the difference between red, yellow or green traffic lights and he would be in constant danger of an accident. It is of no help to him that some or for that matter even most of the lights he perceives as red really happen to be red. The danger comes from the inability to differentiate and separate which his "red projection" imposes upon him.

Where a shadow projection occurs we are not able to differentiate between the actuality of the other person and our own complexes. We cannot tell fact from fancy. We cannot see where we begin and he ends. We cannot see him; neither can we see ourselves."

Posted on by kay

"Learning to integrate shadow material is the single most important task facing mankind, as failure to do so will lead to the extinction of the human race." –Carl Jung

Attack and avoidance

Posted on by kay

My husband is a contractor, so he gets to deal with people who want something from him 'yesterday' on a daily basis. The other day David got a snippy, snooty email message — not a call, not a drop-in visit at the building site, but an email, of course — from one of his clients, telling him to please "focus" and get his job finished immediately.

Now, bear in mind that this same client changed the entire "focus" of the job himself by adding a bathroom to the project. In other words, by more than doubling the amount of work he originally contracted with David to do, after he contracted with David to do it. "Oh! Let's put a bathroom in down there, too!"

But the client couldn't see his own part in creating a problem. All he could see was his own impatience with the result. And all he could think of to do about that impatience was speak to David — via electronic device, of course — as if David were a complete idiot who'd been wasting his time.

Is life in the US becoming one long warlike video game? And are there really only two ways to play the game now, only two strategies for winning: 1) attack or  2) avoidance?

it is hard to gain experience in polite discussion. In parlay and trade-off. We don't have to talk to others very often anymore, especially if we disagree with them. We are so well entertained now — hunkered down in the privacy of our own homes — that we spend most of our free time alone. Hell, we spend most of our work time alone. A computer monitor is not another person. How many jobs these days require the development of diplomacy and/or tact in interpersonal relationships? Versus how many jobs require simply getting one-up on the competition no matter what it takes…?

So maybe it's no surprise that the same thing is happening in personal communication as has already happened when we get behind the wheels of our cars: you can be as selfish as you want, you can project as much blame as you want, you can attack, you can bend the rules, and you do not have to reach a compromise, because you are not really in contact with other people. They can't hit back right away. They are sealed off in their little spaceships of plastic and steel, and you are sealed off in yours.

Similarly, we have developed ways of "speaking" to others or about others, without being anywhere near others. That's what I'm doing right now, with this blog piece, by the way…  I am sealed off, by myself, here in my office, talking to my computer screen about someone else's behavior.

Dangerous.

Dangerous to be developing so many ways of attacking, so many ways of avoiding, while not developing very many ways of arriving at mannerly agreements.

 

“Slut shaming”? It should be “shame on those doing the posting.”

Posted on by kay

If you were listening to NPR a couple of nights ago while making dinner or driving home from work, you might have heard a segment about "slut shaming." Which is what some young people do to other young people via facebook and simliar social media platforms.

And you might have thought you were living in Nathaniel Hawthorne's time, when adulterous women were branded with scarlet A's while adulterous men went scot free.

And you might have gotten scared out of your wits.

Because we are still living in Nathaniel Hawthorne's time, psychologically. Just with far deadlier tools.

What's new and scary is not how awfully and abominably some people treat other people. That's as old as evolution, and presumably not any worse today than it was in ancient times.

What so new and so scary about the times we live in are the devastatingly disasterous ways we've developed for treating one another awfully and abominably.

The bell curve of human intelligence hasn't changed. What's different is our access to one another, our ability to do everlasting harm to others in brief thoughtless minutes.

These days, the meanest, stupidest person in the US probably has several credit cards and an arsenal of guns. Not to mention the ability to say anything about anybody in wildly public ways with no fear of retribution.

Our technology is outrunning our consciousness — by leaps and bounds and laps and laps.

 

 

Everybody’s crazy here

Posted on by kay

Carl Jung once said, "Neurosis is the price we pay for civilization." And even a cursory look within or without proves how accurate that statement is.

Thus, going around trying to prove that you're not crazy — usually by pointing out how crazy other people are — misses the point entirely.

The point is to go and ahead and freely admit how crazy you are, so you can start to do something about it.