“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable, and therefore not popular.” –Carl Jung

I live in Portland, Oregon. If you’ve watched any Portlandia, then you’ll already be aware that we have a fair number of people who lean to the left up here in my neck of the woods. (I love that show. Its creators manage to point out, in an amusing way, how much the far left is just like the far right. It’s always good to poke fun at oneself.)

As Jung was saying up there in the quote, we can’t get any wiser by throwing platitudes around, or by recycling every single plastic bag, or by being as “good” as we possibly can. That’s just not how human consciousness works.

We only get smarter in proportion to how much we can stand to examine the darkness in our own hearts. We’ll only get to where we can ‘see the light,’ by being willing to look into the darkness. Our own darkness. Not other people’s, or the other party’s, or those creeps who don’t recycle. But our own darkness.

“As long as we maintain that all the evil is out there, our ship, like Ahab’s, in on the course of destruction. When we acknowledge that the capacity for evil lives within us as well, we can make peace with our shadow, and our ship can sail safely.”–Andrew Bard Schmookler, analytical psychologist