Jung made at least two incredible discoveries. He wrote about one of them, and we discussed it in our first episode in this series. The other discovery appears nowhere in his writings, but it may have been his greatest by far.

In this contemplation of the shadow we ask some questions, take a kind of inventory, that can help us detect the presence of the shadow so that we could begin to bring light to its contents. But first we consider some of what we need to have in place in order to work skillfully with our unconscious, including a sense of the soul or psyche that transcends even Jung's vision.

As part of our contemplation, we consider an artefact related to Jung that many people haven’t heard about, but which we should take time to consider. This is an episode you don’t want to miss, as it brings us to the place where philosophy, psychology, and spirituality (including ecology and a sense of the Cosmic and the mysterious) come together.

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor. I’m happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

In this contemplation we will bring to a close our basic inquiry into the shadow.

Last time we left with the prospect of considering how to begin to approach the shadow.

Let’s recall a few essential things. First, the shadow is unconscious, which means it is something we don’t know about ourselves.

When I speak to someone about a situation in their life in which they exhibited reactivity, and we begin to ask if the shadow played any role, typically they will explain why it doesn’t make sense, and they will have good reasons for it. But our reasoning in these cases usually amounts to rationalization. If something unconscious has shaped our activity in the world, we can only do a kind of spiritual forensics, and look for evidence of something invisible.

The evidence tends to involve our reactivity, but even that can appear in subtle forms.

For instance, people can put on a happy face. Some people just seem happy go lucky in constitution, and other people have made a conscious decision to avoid negativity. In both cases, we have one basic question: Is the person totally enlightened? Is the person a sage, a saint, an avatar of the divine? If not, then they have encumbered energies in them, and they have an unconscious that contains shadow material.

We may think of the appearance of positivity and joy as healthy, but no form of delusion goes without consequences. People expressing positivity often keep the suffering in the world and even in themselves at a distance, and they do many things they would not do if they could allow themselves to see that suffering clearly. Moreover, they fail to do many things they might not fail to do if they could let themselves clearly perceive the suffering in their own psyche and in the world.

This particular germ seems to have infected a great many people in both new-agey and business circles. Indeed, if business people and new-agey types could see how much they have in common in their basic style of thought, it might give them both pause, and this could help us all to heal.

We have to get clear that we are not trying to give ourselves a problem. Rather, if we have a spiritual orientation to life, we want to give up self-deception, which goes together with giving up all our doing. We have to DO the repression and suppression of our pain and the pain of the world, and we also of course DO lots of needless things, and all this doing degrades the world.

We just want to get more honest about ourselves, our world, and the nature of reality.

And if we aren’t enlightened sages, we will tend to find a lot of dark matter in the psyche. Jung himself famously pointed to this in a discussion of the occult. He wrote that,

“The … primitive fear of ghosts is still deep in our bones, but it is unconscious. Rationalism and superstition are complementary. It is a psychological rule that the brighter the light, the blacker the shadow; in other words, the more rationalistic we are in our conscious minds, the more alive becomes the spectral world of the unconscious. And it is indeed obvious that rationality is in large measure an apotropaic defense against superstition, which is everpresent and unavoidable. The daemonic world of primitives is only a few generations away from us, and the things that have happened and still go on happening in the dictator states teach us how terrifyingly close it is.”

The nugget that many people grab hold of there is that, “the brighter the light, the blacker the shadow.” This applies not just to rationality, but also to our positivity.

People love to speak about moving from the head to the heart, but the heart can act as an apotropaic spell too. Apotropaic means something meant to turn away evil. We can use reason to try and scare away unknown or uncomfortable things. But we can also do this with our feelings.

Jung more than once said that the psyche presents the greatest danger to the world, because we maintain ignorance of it. We don’t really know our own psyche, our own soul, our own mind and heart.

By exploring the shadow, we come into greater intimacy with the psyche, and we come into greater intimacy with the whole of life, the whole of the cosmos.

But one other thing we should mention has to do with a need for a holistic philosophy of life, including a holistic practice of that philosophy. If we try to satisfy ourselves with abstractions, we will ruin ourselves and the world.

We can relate to the shadow as if it were an abstraction, and this will lead to various difficulties, principally that we will either leave material repressed in the shadow because of instinctual fears about how to work with it, or we will let out material we haven’t prepared ourselves to handle. Either way, we perpetuate our ignorance and our suffering, along with the suffering of the world. And if we go rushing into the shadow without preparation, we may create the conditions for a breakdown.

Deep shadow work, like advanced meditation, is not advised for those who need to strengthen their sense of self before any skillful work can begin, and we have to start with things that simply alert us to the presence of the shadow, and go together with increasing mindfulness.

We especially need to establish a strong practice of the four and six immeasurables, including compassion of course, and also some measure of wisdom so that we have a basically helpful view of ourselves and the Cosmos. We should remind ourselves again and again that Jung saw his work as philosophy and saw himself as a philosopher. He understood that we need a philosophy of life in order to properly heal and fulfill our greatest potential.

So we may also want to point out a few things from other philosophical and psychological traditions, like the Buddhist ones.

For instance, the Buddhist tradition might suggest that Jung’s cartography of the soul has some potential faults. First of all, where Jung speaks of an unconscious, the Buddhist traditions might rather speak of increasingly subtle levels of awareness.

Jung felt that what Buddhist philosophy refers to as mind corresponds more to his notion of the unconscious, but this created a puzzle for him. He noted that, to people in the dominant culture, consciousness is inconceivable without an ego, and if there is no ego present, there is no one there to be conscious of anything.

So he saw the ego as indispensable to the conscious process.

Jung wrote that he did not doubt the existence of mental states transcending consciousness, but he felt they somehow had to lose their consciousness, and he wrote that he could not imagine a conscious mental state that does not relate to a subject, to an ego. We can understand Jung’s work as relating to the development of consciousness, which sounds rather nice, but from the Buddhist viewpoint may indicate a limitation.

It turns out that Jung got a glimpse of both this limitation and the wider landscape of the soul beyond it as he went through the death process. The Buddhist tradition works a lot with the death process, and indeed the thoughts from Jung we considered a few moments ago came from his commentary on a bad translation of the book commonly referred to as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In fact, that book is called Liberation on Hearing in the Between.

That’s a great title. It has to do with liberation, and in particular liberation in the between.

The word that means between is bardo in Tibetan. There are many bardos in our lives, because we go from one situation to the next. Everything is neither this nor that, but always between. So our whole life is bardo, and it’s a kind of mindless bardo, as opposed to a mindful and awakened sense of neither this nor that.

Even though we have all these bardos, the Tibetan tradition speaks of 6 main betweens: The between of life, the between of dreaming, the between of meditation, the between of dying, the between of the intrinsic nature of all things where we hang out after we die but before we get reborn, and finally the between of gestation, where we, for instance, grow a body in our mother’s womb.

It may seem strange to us that the Tibetans actually practice for the dying process. This practice goes totally together with meditation and the process of dreaming, because the process of meditation is the essence of betweenness—or, we could say, betweenness IS the meditation experience. That’s how Chogyam Trungpa put it.

Moreover, we can learn to stay aware from the moment we close our eyes, down into the withdrawal of the senses totally into sleep, down into dream, and even down into deep dreamless sleep. For most of us, deep, dreamless sleep means no consciousness. Same thing for dying, since we go through a similar process there.

Jung may or may not have found it odd to speak of awareness in deep dreamless sleep. He certainly wouldn’t call it consciousness, and it was consciousness that held his focus.

Now we come to a fascinating moment. I will share an artefact that seems quite exceptional in terms of the archeology of the soul, and it’s one of the best things I have ever heard about Jung—better than all the things he wrote, and he did write some wonderful and insightful things.

In this letter, she describes how Jung experienced insight through the dying process. I will read it to you.

She wrote,

Surely Jung could have claimed intellectual knowledge of more subtle awareness, but experience is always more precise than our concepts, and he remained ignorant until his death process. We shouldn’t put this off, and should indeed practice not only to prepare for death, but to live better, and to go beyond even what Jung experienced, to the most subtle levels of awareness, and the most transformative insights into ourselves and the Cosmos.

Notice the language in this letter. Hillman wrote that Jung lived in an in between state, those were her words, and that’s the literal meaning of bardo, the word from the Tibetan title of the book we refer to as the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

She wrote that Jung entered “nondirective states,” which makes for a pretty good description of a certain kind of meditative state. We could call meditation a nondirective awareness, or a kind of choiceless awareness, a shift into Liminal Awareness or more subtle levels of awareness that don’t involve agency, subjectivity, time, and other elements as they would typically appear in relation with conquest consciousness or our ordinary egoic consciousness.

This means there isn’t a structure called the conscious mind or ego, and a structure called the unconscious, but rather both what we call conscious and unconscious arise as processes, and they arise from a more subtle level of awareness, awareness that we ourselves ARE. The unconscious is not an ordinary place in the cartography of the soul, but rather the cartography of the soul reveals that places are alive, places are processes. The unconscious isn’t something “other,” but involves habits and processes that we can awaken to, because they exist as a subtle level of awareness.

In other words, Jung experienced a revolution, greater perhaps than the revolution he invited us to see as implicit in the discovery of the unconscious.

And notice that he found consciousness even more limited than he might have thought in light of all his experience with the unconscious.

Doesn’t all of this seem strange?

What did Jung learn?

Shouldn’t all of us wonder about it?

Because, as we just pointed out, it is not just Jung telling us about this, but vast spiritual traditions, including the Tibetan traditions, explicitly teach about the Bardo of death and dying, and they explicitly offer the doctrine, the teaching, the soul medicine of a primordial awareness that is itself the foundation upon which what we call consciousness depends.

The Mind Science, the Nature Science, of many Buddhist traditions invites us to verify this awareness for ourselves, and to allow it to change our way of knowing—our way of living, loving, and liberating in mutuality. Indeed, we can only truly know it in, through, as a better way of knowing

That better way of knowing depends on how we cultivate our awareness. It depends on how we cultivate the mind and heart, which includes becoming mindful and heartful of the body, the emotions, the feelings, the perceptions, and the various mental formations that arise in our awareness and constitute our habitual experience.

Shadow work depends on awareness, first and foremost, in the context of our highest values and the basic intention of an awakening heart.

In other words, shadow work depends on awareness first and foremost, but even prior to that it depends on ethics, on love and compassion and a conscientious way of making a living in the world. Shadow work has to unfold on the basis of right livelihood and ethical conscience.

And it requires a basic vision of the Cosmos, a philosophically skillful and realistic sense of what a human being is, what reality is, what a healthy mind might be—which would include a nonduality between the conscious and unconscious, a nonduality between mind and Nature, a nonduality between Nature and culture, a nonduality between Cosmos and psyche.

Once we have these and other basics of LoveWisdom in place, we begin with awareness, the great medicine for the soul.

Recall that awareness as a skill involves inhibiting habitual patterns, slowing down, pausing to perceive—pause-and-perceive; stopping-and-sensing. We can only heal the shadow when we can sense its activity.

In a general way, we can begin with a kind of inventory and reflection. It could help us begin to notice the activity of the shadow. Remember, we are trying to notice the effects of something at first invisible to us.

The main way we do this, the central work, involves intimacy with our own experience. We can start to notice our own reactivity and our repeating patterns of behavior, and these can sometimes indicate the presence of shadow material. The shadow is not synonymous with samsara or the cycle of ignorance, but our suffering and ignorance can only happen on the basis of ignorance and unconscious dynamics. Our practice relaxes us so that we can become liberated into more subtle awareness, and thus we can liberate the energy trapped in these habitual patterns.

Again, as a way of entry, we can also take an inventory, a series of prompts that we can respond to and notice our responses.

To work with this inventory, just let the words I speak sink into your mind. You will hear me describe someone or read a partial statement. In the case of describing someone or bringing someone to mind, let the person come to mind and notice how you feel. Relax the temptation to rationalize and notice the energy or reactivity in your body and mind—not so much the contents of thought, but the basic quality.

In the case of a statement, complete the statement as directly as you can, without thinking or analyzing. Let yourself surprise yourself with your own honesty and insight.

We can put these and other items on the WLB website if you like.

Okay. Ready? We’re evoking invisible things. Relax. Nothing here can hurt us. We’re safe, and we’re just using a light touch.

Let’s start with this:

Think of someone you find really irritating.

Something that really gets on my nerves is______________.

Try this one:

It’s not easy to admit, but the thing that scares me the most is ___________.

Here’s another one:

The people I most love might not love me back if they knew that __________________.

Or finally, this one:

I have to admit that I might feel much happier and more accomplished in my life if only I ________________________.

Shadow work has to do with ending self-deception. It has to do with the actual practice of wisdom, love, and beauty, which includes the practice of compassion. The practice of compassion, the practice of wisdom, love, and beauty means taking care of suffering and ignorance wherever we find it. If we find it in ourselves, then we take care of it there. We don’t give up on anyone or anything. We go to the places that scare us and we help those we think we cannot help—even if the places that scare us are in our own mind and heart, and even if the one we think most beyond help is ourselves.

We seek a basic kindness for ourselves in order to offer a basic kindness to the world. But we could put that in many ways. We could just as easily say we seek our own basic wisdom, so we can offer that to the world. We seek the basic goodness of the world, right here in our own heart. We seek to understand and then wonderstand how Nature works, how Cosmos and psyche actually function. We can’t understand or wonderstand the functioning of life if we remain in ignorance, and if we remain trapped in personal and cultural patterns of insanity.

Shadow work thus includes noticing patterns, noticing reactivity, noticing reflexes, tensions, bracings, habits. It involves beginning to sense the “strange attractors” and curvatures in the space of the soul that draw us into orbits of thought, speech, and action which keep us encumbered and asleep.

As we notice them, we can inhibit them, which means saying a life-affirming “No” to them. We can also begin to investigate them, working with mindfulness, and also incorporating techniques such as demon feeding to help liberate and heal these obstructions, releasing their encumbered energy for the benefit of all beings. It’s gritty work at times, but the whole world depends on it.

And some of the people I work with continue to express disbelief or surprise or other forms of suspicion when it comes to the unconscious. They believe that their spiritual path and that the work that they’ve done has excavated the unconscious, or in general we should say the ways our unconscious could manipulate us remains inconceivable. We can’t conceive it because it’s unconscious, it happens unconsciously.

So anyone who comes to philosopher or therapist and admits suffering, admits that they don’t have it all figured out, admits that they still have work to do then admits unconscious dynamics and admits that some of what goes on involves the 95% of them they cannot perceive directly, the aspects of the psyche that direct and control things out of alignment with our supposedly conscious intentions.

That’s crucial. That’s it. The consciousness is too small of a bandwidth. It can’t manipulate and control reality. That’s the great insanity: That we’re trying to manipulate and control. And that’s not even scientifically possible—just by doing the math for the most rational people in the world, we find that that’s not possible.

So then even if we said, well, I will admit that maybe 10% of my activity might be the unconscious driving things. That still means 10% of what we do came from unconscious dynamics.

And so, in such cases, we had one conscious intention, we were thinking something was going on and, we would tell the story in a certain way, and in fact, the story is a lie, and the real story remains unconscious.

Somebody asks us, “What did you do right there?” And we would tell them, “This is what was happening. This is what my intentions were. This is what I was doing.” And the truth would be no, that is not it.

But we would be convinced of our story, We would say, “No, that really is what happened. Those really were my intentions, and this really is what I was doing.” But in fact, it wasn’t.

And if that’s true even one time out of every 10 things we do—and keep in mind that this is impossible to keep track of, because we’re just going along all the time, there’s activity all the time and speaking of 10% doesn’t make sense.

So imagine you’re awake for 16 hours and you’re doing things. And so, if we tried to get very literal, we might say that, for over an hour and a half, unconscious dynamics would run the show.

But it’s more nuanced than that. The point is that major undertakings in our life could get directed by unconscious dynamics. The marriage or relationship that you initiate, maybe the one you’re in right now, you might be in it because of unconscious dynamics primarily, not because of anything that you’ll consciously explain to anybody, including your partner, and you might have all kinds of wonderful reasons for being with a person or for ending a relationship, but in fact, the shadow and other unconscious dynamics have been at work, you’re projecting onto this person.

As we said before, we might get into a relationship purely out of hunger for initiation, and we get hooked by the archetype of initiation. We start projecting onto this person, all sorts of archetypal energies—or maybe we were doing this projecting, and now we no longer can, and we have real difficulty.

This in fact destroys many relationships, because a relationship can start to get stagnant, and then somebody else comes along and provokes the archetype of initiation, provokes the unconscious dynamics, and suddenly a person finds themselves in the middle of an affair because they weren’t addressing their spiritual needs in a holistic way, and terrible consequences ensue.

We need to address these things. Otherwise we project them. And that’s the point of Trump too. Trump exists because of the shadows, because we don’t take it seriously.

And then we project onto other people, political figures, romantic figures, our therapists, whatever it might be.

Related to all this is that we can ask the question: Well, what’s the 5%? Recall last time we contemplated the recent finding in science that what we previously thought of as the whole universe is only 5% of the stuff out there, and thus 95% has been invisible to us.

Psychologically speaking, the 5% is what we call normal. It’s what we call natural—what we want to call normal and natural.

And what’s the 95%? That’s the paranormal. That’s the supernatural. And as Jeffrey Kripal points out, nature’s already super then.

Inherently nature is super because inherently nature transcends the 5% or whatever tiny fraction the ego can actually deal with.

And we’re never going to manipulate it and control nature. We can’t even manage our own psyche and these beings who can’t manage their own psyche, whose psyche already outstrips the ego, these beings act as if they can command and control nature.

Because ego thinks of itself as a command-and-control unit.

But it’s not.

The psyche is self-organizing and self-perpetuating. It organizes from and towards its own wholeness.

The ego doesn’t do that. The ego doesn’t know how to do that—because it’s a part. A part can’t manipulate and control the whole—we’ll never get enough information to do that.

Therefore, even the approach of information management doesn’t make any sense.

You’re not going to do that. You’re going to have a bunch of egos trying to figure things out that will work.

So we have to be able to find ways to enter into the super natural—not in some way that becomes irrational or new age-y or deluded—but the end of delusion.

Self-deception means that some ego can control the whole. It can’t.

Self-deception means the persona is me, or what is conscious is me,

but we’re more than that. We transcend the ego, we transcend what’s conscious, we transcend the boundaries of the skin.

And we can say that as a belief—as if we’re all for it. And then when we confront the reality and what it would mean to live our lives, suddenly we don’t know what to do.

In practice, we don’t think so. In practice, we’re terrified if somebody puts an end to the skin bag. And so that means that, in practice, anything that threatens it becomes something we want to avoid and we’ll play all the games that we play in order to do that, to avoid the experience of initiation.

A much more challenging situation than generally we acknowledge. That’s all we’re saying here is that it’s, it’s tricky. It’s not easy

so, okay. How do we proceed? How do we proceed and allow a skillful sense of the magical, a skillful sense of the superness of nature? That’s what we need: A skillful sense of the superness of nature.

And that requires initiation. Initiation doesn’t mean joining a cult. The Christian church initiates people. All venerable traditions have initiations, and the deepest work we do in these traditions unfolds AS an initiation, a kind of ongoing initiation that happens outside of a ceremonial context, though it may relate to ceremonial or other similar contexts as well.

We seek initiation anyway, and if we don’t do it formally and then deliberately face our shadow, then the shadow and other unconscious elements will drive us into initiations that unfold clumsily. We have names for those. We call them extramarital affairs, drug addictions, bad relationships of all kinds, risk-taking behaviors, and so on.

Sometimes these foolish kinds of initiation get some of the work done. At the very least, they can be humiliating, and humiliation forms a central part of initiation. Skillful initiation puts the ego in its place so to speak, and ideally it ends up decentering the ego, putting the ego in orbit around something, in contrast to the ego’s attempt to put everything in orbit around it.

That’s what happens in the foolish initiations: The ego keeps trying to put everything in orbit around itself, and reality won’t comply, and so we end up with a broken marriage, or we end up losing our house or job. And we get some insights from these things if we’re lucky, but often the ego mostly stays in control.

When initiation or shadow work is done in a more empowering way, it involves a clearer decentering of the ego.

The ego, which tries to hide behind the persona or the face we show the world, when we do shadow work or undergo initiation, that ego now has to say, “Uh-oh . . . there’s this other stuff in the psyche and in the world,” and the ego faces the possibility that this other stuff might be more us than we are comfortable with. Not only does the ego face the reality that it can’t control everything, but it faces the puzzle of how to integrate this other stuff, how to genuinely incorporate it.

For instance, it might be difficult stuff because it’s encumbered—it hasn’t been cultivated and developed.

We can’t just incorporate our anger—that won’t get us anywhere. It’s a good first step to just acknowledge the anger. We need to have moved from repressed anger, or repressed despair—That’s a big one for many of us, the repressed despair. Many of us want to have such a positive mindset.

We don’t want to draw in anything negative. If we look carefully, we may notice a lot of neurotic avoidance of bad moods, or any mention of the problems and wounds of the world. We don’t want to act like there’s a problem in the world, or that we face real urgency in our situation right now.

Instead we have to experience ourselves as very evolved. And we just see everything as, something like learning, and new experiences, and all the rest.

Meanwhile, something in us experiences terrible grief, despair, hopelessness, fear, anger, frustration, a sense of intense urgency . . . all sorts of things. And we won’t let ourselves acknowledge these things, because we know that in its current state, it’s often embarrassing. But we can’t liberate that energy if we won’t let ourselves experience it.

And if we merely let ourselves experience it, we’re indulging it. For instance, experiencing it in the limited way that the ego is used to would mean having a tantrum. And that might be where we have to start. Because we don’t know what else to do. So the first thing is we might have a tantrum.

It’s not to say that’s required or that we should encourage it. It’s just to acknowledge that the energy’s encumbered, and that’s why we won’t, we don’t want to look at it—because we don’t know what, what to do with it, how to liberate it. That’s why we need practices. That’s why we need training. We don’t have a context for that. We have an anti-culture.

And when we get a little bit of training, we can have a sense of the difference between awareness and what we’re aware of—relative difference, temporary relational difference, because what we’re aware of itself is awareness.

Nevertheless, some part of us—we become aware of some part of us—we could be become aware that anger is arising. We don’t have to identify with it. We don’t have to get hooked by it. That’s the importance of compassion. I don’t have to say “I am angry.” There’s anger here. We can take care of it.

Acknowledge it fully accept it fully.

It doesn’t mean we give into it. It doesn’t mean we wallow or indulge, but we accept— there it is: Anger is arising and what wants to be seen clearly? How can we liberate this into mirror-like wisdom?

It’s what it is. But right now it’s encumbered. We can’t wish that away.

We can’t pretend that it’s not—that’s why we’re embarrassed because it makes us want to hit somebody. And whatever is in there, somehow or other there’s a moral judgment attached to it. That’s crucial to recognize.

And it might be a very reasonable, moral judgment, because if it’s the things in an encumbered state, how it’s going to come out is either violent or immature, childish, disruptive . . . and it’s really pent up. So that is not going to come out really in a healthy way then, yeah, we can understand why we’re moralizing around it.

Other times, it’s just that we have a bad idea. Of course we can have a bad idea, that we’re not allowed to be kind or soft or vulnerable . . .

But even the vulnerability . . . Vulnerability as we typically express it—anything that’s there that was put there in childhood or was put there in the context of not being fully awake to reality has some encumberment in it.

We don’t have to pretend that that’s not true.

So that means that even if we say, Oh, well, my vulnerability is in the shadow. And now the ego is going to very proudly march up and say, “Look how vulnerable I’m being!”

but that’s not vulnerability from the standpoint of wisdom, because wisdom means that we can allow ourselves to be totally vulnerable because we’ve realized our invulnerability, we realize that what we are can’t be harmed, can’t be destroyed, wasn’t born, won’t die.

And for the most part, we don’t realize that when we’re talking about our vulnerability,

vulnerability gets restricted to something also useful, but not the same. It means, okay, well, this is uncomfortable and I’m willing to sit with it. This is scary and I’m willing to stay.

That’s a little different. So there’s just a lot more nuance than we’re willing to recognize.

There’s a difference between recognizing the thing versus repressing—and that’s an important first step—

but then there’s a further difference between that and liberating the energy, letting that energy liberate us, in fact, because we don’t go in there and liberate the energy again, that’s some ego maneuver, but we allow the self-liberation to unfold.

To refer to these patterns as energy gets us in that shadowy territory of energy talk. People use the term energy to explain just about everything under the sun, and they usually end up explaining nothing at all. The wisdom traditions have a very specific meaning in referring to energy, and the trauma, shame, and other patterns we carry like a great burden have to do with energy that can liberate us—

But that’s far more likely to happen within a venerable philosophical tradition, a lineage of practice handed down from one highly accomplished person to another. If we try to do this kind of work outside of a holistic, wise, compassionate, and highly developed philosophy of life, we almost certainly limit ourselves.

And the problem we face is that countless sentient beings depend on us. The world, our Earth and Her beings, the whole community of life, it all depends on us, everyone we love as well as total strangers now depend on us.

The stakes are too high for us to do anything less than our very, very best—with an attitude of joy and positivity . . . a confidence that comes from the histories of practice and realization that we can now take up. We must find a good lineage, seek initiation, and take up the work all beings depend on us to do.

If you have any questions or reflections about this week’s contemplation, send them in through WLB, and we might consider them in a future contemplation.

Until then, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your soul and the soul of the world are not two things—take good care of them.