Paying Attention to the Stuck Places

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gnarled-ancient-roots

This is James Hollis talking, in Why Good People Do Bad Things:

“All of us have stuck places in our contemporary life. We are well aware of some of them, and we mobilize New Year’s resolutions to overthrow them, albeit with mixed results. Others are less conscious and reassert themselves through our daily reflexive responses to ordinary life. These stuck places, if tracked, always reveal an invisible filament that leads back to some archaic fear that, overwhelming the child, still has the residual energy to intimidate, even shut down, the adult. Taking on this fear, however real or unreal it may prove to be, is the Shadow task that the psychopathology of everyday life brings to the surface and to challenge each of us.

An example of this archaic dilemma might be found in the preoccupation with dieting that forms so many of our resolutions. On the surface, all we have to do is eat less, but we slip into old patterns easily enough and the pounds return. What is the archaic fear that eating is surreptitiously “treating”? Such intimidating fear, if brought into consciousness, would ask: “If  I do not eat this, what then will nourish me?” Rather than  go unnourished emotionally, we will continue to transfer our psychological needs onto matter, and the pounds persist.

The paradox of healing our sundry pathologies is that only by a continuing attention to them, and a respect for what they are telling us, can we ever be free of them. In the end, we do not wish to believe that our life is governed by the agenda of others, or by fear, or by our defended response to both. We with to be here, as we are, as who we really are. In “the psychopathology of everyday life” we are invited to confront a great deal of personal Shadow material. Even if this summons asks us to revisit wounded places, we are progressively brought to larger life through a more differentiated relationship to our own psychological complexity. When we do not look within, something within is looking at us nonetheless, subtly making decisions for us. We wish to respect our pathos — our suffering — yet not be passive or pathetic.”

–James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things, Understanding Our Darker Selves, Gotham Books, 2007, p 81-82.

…when we do not look within, something within is looking at us nonetheless, subtly making decisions for us…

…The paradox of healing our sundry pathologies is that only by a continuing attention to them, and a respect for what they are telling us, can we ever be free of them…

Chap 11 Full Page

Owning Your Own Shadow

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The following is from Owning Your Own Shadow, by Robert Johnson, whom I heartily recommend.

“The ego and the shadow come from the same source and exactly balance one another. To make light is to make shadow: one cannot exist without the other.

To own one’s 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.

India has three terms describing this place of sainthood: sat, chit, ananda. Sat is the existential stuff of life (mostly the left side of the balance); chit is the ideal capacity (mostly the right side of the balance); ananda is the bliss, joy, ecstasy of enlightenment — the fulcrum of the seesaw. What sat and chit are paired together, and sufficiently conscious, then ananda, the joy of life, is created. This is won by owning one’s own shadow.

If we act from the extreme right, we will knowingly or unknowingly have to balance this with some act from the left side. We do not even have to turn our head around to know that we have created an equally dark content. 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. We are also talking about sainthood in the original meaning of the word — a full-blooded embracing of our own humanity, not a one-sided goodness that has no vitality or life.

A friend asked me recently why so many creative people have such a miserable time of it. History abounds with stories of shocking or eccentric behavior among the great. Narrow creativity always brings a narrow shadow with it, while broader talents call up a greater portion of the dark. Schumann, the composer, went mad; the world knows about the very dark side of Picasso’s life; and everyone hears stories about local geniuses with their unusual habits. While those with the largest talent seem to suffer most, we all must be aware of how we use our creativity — and of the dark side that accompanies our gifts. To make a work of art, to say something kind, to help others, to beautify the house, to protect the family — all these acts will have an equal weight on the opposite side of the scale and can lead us into error. We cannot refuse our creativity or stop expressing ourselves in this way; yet we can be aware of this dynamic and make some small but conscious gesture to compensate for it.

Marie-Louise von Franz and Barbara Hannah, who shared a household in Kusnacht, Switzerland, had the custom of requiring whoever had some especially good fortune to carry out the garbage for the week. This is a simple but powerful act. Symbolically speaking, they were playing out the shadow side of something positive. Carl Jung often greeted a friend by asking, “Had any terrible successes lately?” because he also was aware of the close proximity of light and darkness.

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…

…It is possible to live one’s ideals, do one’s best, be courteous, do well at work, and live a decent civilized life if we ritually acknowledge this other dimension of reality. The unconscious cannot tell the difference between a “real” act and a symbolic one. This means that we can aspire to beauty and goodness — and pay out the darkness in a symbolic way. This enables us to do the upkeep and keep the balance.”

— from Owning Your Own Shadow, Understanding The Dark Side of the Psyche, Robert Johnson, HarperSan Francisco paperback, 1991, p 17-21.

stupid-ugly-monster

fairy

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half-jester-half-king-mask

“It is better always to remain in an attitude of doubt toward one’s own behavior, which means to do the best one can, but always to be ready to assume that one has made a mistake.” — Marie-Louise von Franz, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales

I’d quit if I could, I promise

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A curious thing happens to you when you've thought about the human shadow long enough: you get to where you just can't stand to think about it anymore. Where everything looks and sounds like shadow. Where you just want to retreat from the world, pull the woods and the grandkids over your head, and hide.

Which doesn't work, of course. My own shadow follows me into every hiding place. I tuck myself in comfortably and then hear myself griping and carping about someone who's merely acting in a way I've acted myself on many an occasion.

That's what's so depressing about it, I suppose. There is nowhere to hide.

I live in a bubble of plenty: of beautiful scenery with private spaces full of talented, well-educated and well-connected neighbors. And even here we squabble. Feuds regularly erupt over something minor which can last for years. Our famous women's group, which has gotten together every full moon for going on 18 years now, just got into a big tizzy over the suggestion that, since it's a neighborhood group, our meetings should be held in the neighborhood. ??? 

Say something — anything, even something as obvious as that — in a group of people — any group of people, even the most kind and well meaning — then sit back and watch the projections fly. Some of the most famously, fiercely contentious organizations in the world exist to study the works of Carl Jung, who first coined the term "human shadow." Really. True dat.

Why are human beings — even those blessed with peace and plenty — so easy to upset? Don't we have anything better to do than pounce all over one another at the slightest provocation?

Nope. Not so far. We're generally not any better at getting along with each another than hummingbirds. The more feeders you put out, the more hummingbirds will come to swarm around and fight over the feeders.

Which I find so alarming — in humans, not in hummingbirds — that I start trying to write about the human shadow again.

Argh. 

"We might just be in time to stop the apocalypse. But it will be touch and go." –Konrad Lorenz

 

The Shadow of Wealth

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Sex used to be the most difficult topic for people to speak candidly about. 

But ask any analyst working today, and they'll tell you that, nope, talking about sex comes easy these days. Now, the most difficult topic for people to be perfectly candid about is money. Personal finances. Whether you can actully afford your boat, or whether you're slowly sinking under the weight of the debt required to keep your boat afloat.

It's not a new flaw. What was Vanity Fair about? Or Oblonsky's character in Anna Karenina?  Or The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton? Plenty of the classics deal with those who simply cannot imagine living without a great deal of wealth at their disposal.

"Lydgate was now experiencing something worse than a simple deficit: he was assailed by the vulgar hateful trials of a man who has bought and used a great many things which might have been done without, and which he is unable to pay for, though the demand for payment has become pressing… Rosamond, accustomed from her childhood to an extravagant household, thought that good housekeeping consisted simply in ordering the best of everything — nothing else 'answered'; and Lydgate supposed that 'if things were done at all, they must be done properly' — he did not see how they were to live otherwise."  –from Middlemarch, by George Eliot

And these folks did not have access to credit cards, poor dears. Just imagine how much trouble Rosamond and Tertius could have gotten into with 8 or 9 credit cards at 13.99% interest!

The shadow of the USA's vast wealth can be seen most clearly in how broke and strapped and overextended its citizens feel about money. Because most of what we "have" isn't paid for. We call it "ours," as in "our house," but it really belongs to a bank that would not hesitate to take it away from us should we miss a few payments. Which ties our homes and possessions and the very stability of our families to jobs we probably don't like, but don't feel we can afford to lose — even when those jobs are soul-killing. (No wonder zombie movies are so popular. I love that scene in Shaun of the Dead where it takes him awhile to notice the zombie invasion because that's how people usually look in the mornings.) How has it happened in the country which thinks of itself as the richest in the world, that 2 adults have to work for someone else 5 days a week in order to support 1 infant? Are things that much more expensive these days? Yes they are. And do we think we need more of them? Yes we do.  

Even our politicians obsess about debt. Especially our politicians obsess about debt. Deficits. With the party that spends the most when in office always calling the other party to task for poor management, naturally. And neither party making much headway against it. 

Debt: it's the shadow of wealth.

 

 

Eric Schlosser Nails It Again

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Some people really do know how to make a difference in their culture. And one of them is Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation, 2001; Reefer Madness, 2003).

The September 30th issue of The New Yorker has an in-depth review by Louis Menaud of Schlosser's newest book, Command and Control. Here's a quote from that review:

"…an excellent journalistic investigation of the efforts since the first atomic bomb was exploded, outside Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, to put some kind of harness on nuclear weaponry. By a miracle of information management, Schlosser has synthesized a huge archive of material, including government reports, scientific papers, and a substantial historical and polemical literature on nukes, and transformed it into a crisp narrative covering more than fifty years of scientific and political change. And he has interwoven that narrative with a hair-raising, minute-by-minute account of an accident at a Titan II missile silo in Arkansas, in 1980, which he renders in the manner of a techno-thriller…

…Command and Control is how non-fiction should be written."

And once again for Schlosser, written about something we all should know.

Kudos to Eric Schlosser for the new book, and kudos to Louis Menaud for a wonderfully written, in-depth review. I highly recommend both.

 

 

 

 

 

Wisps in the wind

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"Among the forces which sweep and play throughout the universe, untutored man is but a wisp in the wind. Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.

On the tiger no responsibility rests. We see him aligned by nature with the forces of life–he is born into their keeping and without thought he is protected.

We see man far removed from the lairs of the jungles, his innate instincts dulled by too near an approach to free-will, his free-will not sufficiently developed to afford him perfect guidance…

As a beast, the forces of life aligned him with them; as a man, he has not yet wholly learned to align himself with the forces."

–Theodore Dreiser, in Sister Carrie

I’m afraid Icarus is driving

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"Our personal psychology is just a thin skin, a ripple on the ocean of collective psychology. The archetypes are the great decisive forces. They bring about the real events, not our personal reasoning and practical intellect… –CG Jung

 

OK, that's arguable. Because, as usual, Jung was saying something intiutive rather than something statistically provable.

But if we cede him the format — that certain instinctual forces drive humanity as a whole, from the inside out — and if we look at our own little slice of history that way, as a mere ripple in the great current of humanity occurring on this planet, then what would be the driving archetypal images of our time?

The first one that comes to mind is hubris. The pride that goes before the fall. The idea that whatever you think of can be (or even should be) done.

Then of course there are aggressive images.

Represented by the beasts, the monsters, the ogres, the tyrants in our tales…

And finally, there's greed: that ole dragon of capitalism, lurking and lying in wait within us all.

Nothing pessimistic about me.

 

 

Prejudices

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I'm still on George Eliot, here. Because her insights are so right on. Because she was frackin' brilliant.

How brilliant? Mary Anne Evans, aka George Eliot, was a wildly successful female novelist from her very first published novel, Adam Bede… in the Victorian Age.

Despite living openly with a man who happened to be married to someone else, Eliot held a weekly salon attended by England's best and brightest lights. She counted that epitome of moral rectitude, Queen Victoria herself, among her most ardent fans.

When you can even get those who disapprove of you to approve of your work?… that's brilliance, folks.

Here's what Eliot has to say about prejudices:

 

"To minds strongly marked by the positive and negative qualities that create severity — strength of will, conscious rectitude of purpose, narrowness of imagination and intellect, great power of self-control, and a disposition to exert control over others — prejudices come as the natural food of tendencies which can get no sustenance out of that complex, fragmentary, doubt-provoking knowledge which we call truth.

Let a prejudice be bequeathed, carried in the air, adopted by hearsay, caught in through the eye — however it may come — these minds will give it a habitation; it is something to assert strongly and bravely, something to fill up that void of spontaneous ideas, something to impose on others with the authority of conscious right; it is at once a staff and a baton."          –George Eliot, from The Mill on the Floss

 

Interesting that she links those who tend to be severe, and those who have a vacuum in the spontaneous ideas department, with those who tend to form prejudices.

Gives us a better grasp on the handle of human nature.

The Problem with Free Will

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The mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it. –George Eliot, in Middlemarch