If you don’t look for Sophia in the shadows, She might come leaping out of them. The consequences can become severe.

“Shadow work” has gotten increasing attention in the dominant culture. This tends to carry the risk of trivialization and increasing spiritual materialism. Here we take a philosophical look at the unconscious and the nature of shadow work. Generally speaking, the dominant culture and most of the people of that culture haven’t come to terms with the unconscious, even though the spiritual and philosophical traditions warn us of its power to keep us in delusion. We avoid in the unconscious in part because, as Freud put it, the revelation of its presence and significance struck a major blow to the western ego. How can we more fully face up to the unconscious and begin to more skillfully work with it? We begin a short series of contemplations into these matters, building up to the sheer terror that the vastness of the psyche can evoke in us. In this first contemplation, we won’t rush into that terror, but begin to gather our senses and our sensibility to consider the questions and challenges the unconscious presents.

Sophia waits for you in the shadows

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, happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

Today we go into the wisdom, love, and beauty archives to re-release our series on the shadow. If you haven’t heard this series, you’re in for a treat. It relates to the series on magic, and like that series it has some rather delicious wisdom donuts in it—superfood snacks for the soul.

If you have listened to some or all of this series before, these podcasts usually require more than one listen. We go into ideas that we try to consider in a very accessible way, but those ideas have a lot of nuance and depth in them. Extensive contemplation will bring a lot of benefits, including some inspiration and insight into the nature of both Cosmos and Psyche.

This is part one of the series, and to start us off I thought it might be helpful to say a few things that could make the connection to our reflections on magic a little clearer, and might also open up our sense of wonder with regard to the unconscious.

We will mention Jung throughout this short series. It’s just four episodes. In episode three, we will consider what might have been Jung’s greatest discovery—a discovery you won’t read about in any of his writings.

But this series also touches one of his other great discoveries, and maybe this discovery is the greatest discovery Jung made that you can read about. That discovery has to do with what we sometimes refer to as the collective unconscious. We could also call it the objective psyche, or the nonlocal ecology of mind.

This series on the shadow has to do with our unconscious. Most of us think of our unconscious as a personal possession. We think of the psyche as exclusively subjective.

But let’s recall Yeats’ three principles of magic. In summary, Yeats said that we aren’t confined to a bag of skin. It’s worthwhile to consider Yeats’ words together again. He wrote,

I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed down from early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical practices. These doctrines are—

(1) That the borders of our minds are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.

(2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.

(3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.

I often think I would put this belief in magic from me if I could, for I have come to see or to imagine, in men and women, in houses, in handicrafts, in nearly all sights and sounds, a certain evil, a certain ugliness, that comes from the slow perishing through the centuries of a quality of mind that made this belief and its evidences common over the world.

That’s the fuller passage.

Let’s assume Yeats is correct: Mind and memory transcend the personal psyche. Because of this, we live in an ecology of mind, or maybe countless overlapping ecologies of mind, all completely interwoven.

How does that ecology function? Well, it has an activity of patterning in it. And we can evoke that patterning, somehow affect it or dance with it. When we do that in a certain way, we regard that as the practice of magic.

Yeats gives us a vision of a living, loving Earth, a living loving Cosmos alive with mind, memory, and magic. Yeats expresses the nonduality of spiritual and ecological reality, the nonduality of mind and Nature, soul and soil, psyche and Cosmos. The Cosmos and our home are magical relationality all the way down, which makes the magic perfectly natural. Magic sounds rather woo-woo, but when we think of it as Yeats did, then we find it quite logical.

If Yeats has it right, then we might refer to the mind and this memory as a collective unconscious. Mostly we remain unconscious of it, but the practice of magic allows us to bring light into it, and to bring some of it to light.

We accomplish this conjuring by means of symbols. The symbols may take the form of amulets, potions, charms and spells, magical rites and rituals, ceremonies, and other practices. We can think of these as symbols of transformation, or symbols of conjuring and consummation.

The nonduality of spiritual and ecological reality together with this use of symbols of transformation speaks in support of one of Jung’s wildest ideas: the ides of objective psyche, the collective unconscious.

In his book, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, Jung defines the collective unconscious this way:

“In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.” (CW 9i, para 90)

The idea of the collective unconscious can in some ways seem easy to grasp intellectually. But at a merely intellectual level, we seem to repress the implications for our lives. Those implications often burst forth in the most disturbing ways, and in those moments we don’t always find ourselves opening up to the mystery, but instead find ourselves rationalizing away.

If Jung has it right, then we all have an aspect of our psyche that dwarfs what we would habitually think of as personal. The psyche has an impersonal aspect, and that impersonal aspect drives our experience of life and the happenings of our life. This doesn’t mean we live exclusively as victims of the unconscious. But it does mean that the unconscious, and its symbols, may have far more to do with the events of our lives than we might care to acknowledge.

When we bring together Jung’s idea of the collective psyche and Yeats’ idea of the collective psyche, then we find both of them inviting us to see that we live in a magical world. It’s this world. But we may miss the magic of it. We would need an education to help us speak this magical language, sing this magical music, dance these magical dances.

Part of that education would involve learning the landscape of our own psyche, training ourselves to be able to bring light into the dark places of the soul, and learn to work skillfully with the magic of the world. We would have to begin to free ourselves from unconscious control. We can think of that as purifying our karma, liberating ourselves from invisible ties and invisible spells that bind us.

Before we get to the original podcast on the shadow, I thought it might be nice to consider a passage from Jung together.

Almost four decades after publishing his book, Symbols of Transformation, Jung edited the book and re-released it. In the preface to the new edition, he writes a few things that seem worthy of contemplation in light of our consideration of magic, mystery, and the state of the world. Among other things, he writes about how his view of the psyche transcends the limits on the psyche that a strictly personal view of the mind would impose. He connects his idea with myth, and he does this in ways most urgent for us to consider at this moment in history. It’s worth keeping in mind that these remarks come from a man over 70 years old, looking back with the benefit of a long perspective, and an incredibly rich career.

It’s a longer passage, and I’ll let you know when we get to the end. Jung writes,

The urgency that lay behind [this book] became clear to me only later: it was the explosion of all those psychic contents which could find no room, no breathing-space, in the constricting atmosphere of Freudian psychology and its narrow outlook. I have no wish to denigrate Freud, or to detract from the extraordinary merits of his investigation of the individual psyche. But the conceptual framework into which he fitted the psychic phenomenon seemed to me unendurably narrow. I am not thinking here of his theory of neurosis, which can be as narrow as it pleases if only it is adequate to the empirical facts, or of his theory of dreams, about which different views may be held in all good faith; I am thinking more of the reductive causalism of his whole outlook, and the almost complete disregard of the teleological directedness which is so characteristic of everything psychic. Although Freud’s book The Future of an Illusion dates from his later years, it gives the best possible account of his earlier views, which move within the confines of the outmoded rationalism and scientific materialism of the late nineteenth century.

As might be expected, my book, born under such conditions, consisted of larger or smaller fragments which I could only string together in an unsatisfying manner. It was an attempt, only partially successful, to create a wider setting for medical psychology and to bring the whole of the psychic phenomenon within its purview. One of my principal aims was to free medical psychology from the subjective and personalistic bias that characterized its outlook at that time, and to make it possible to understand the unconscious as an objective and collective psyche. The personalism in the views of Freud and Adler that went hand in hand with the individualism of the nineteenth century failed to satisfy me because, except in the case of instinctive dynamisms (which actually have too little place in Adler), it left no room for objective, impersonal facts. Freud, accordingly, could see no objective justification for my attempt, but suspected personal motives.

Thus this book became a landmark, set up on the spot where two ways divided. Because of its imperfections and its incompleteness it laid down the programme to be followed for the next few decades of my life. Hardly had I finished the manuscript when it struck me what it means to live with a myth, and what it means to live without one . . . the man who thinks he can live without myth, or outside it, is an exception. He is like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society. He does not live in a house like other men, does not eat and drink like other men, but lives a life of his own, sunk in a subjective mania of his own devising, which he believes to be the newly discovered truth. This plaything of his reason never grips his vitals. It may occasionally lie heavy on his stomach, for that organ is apt to reject the products of reason as indigestible. The psyche is not of today; its ancestry goes back many millions of years. Individual consciousness is only the flower and the fruit of a season, sprung from the perennial rhizome beneath the earth; and it would find itself in better accord with the truth if it took the existence of the rhizome into its calculations. For the root matter is the mother of all things.

So I suspected that myth had a meaning which I was sure to miss if I lived outside it in the haze of my own speculations. I was driven to ask myself in all seriousness: “What is the myth you are living?” I found no answer to this question, and had to admit that I was not living with a myth, or even in a myth, but rather in an uncertain cloud of theoretical possibilities which I was beginning to regard with increasing distrust. I did not know that I was living a myth, and even if I had known it, I would not have known what sort of myth was ordering my life without my knowledge. So, in the most natural way, I took it upon myself to get to know “my” myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks, for—so I told myself—how could I, when treating my patients, make due allowance for the personal factor, for my personal equation, which is yet so necessary for a knowledge of the other person, if I was unconscious of it? I simply had to know what unconscious or preconscious myth was forming me, from what rhizome I sprang. This resolve led me to devote many years of my life to investigating the subjective contents which are the products of unconscious processes, and to work out methods which would enable us, or at any rate help us, to explore the manifestations of the unconscious. Here I discovered, bit by bit, the connecting links that I should have known about before if I was to join up the fragments of my book.”

When I think about the collective psyche, it gives me a sense of optimism. It fits in with a major focus of my own work, which involves a restoration of the spiritual and ecological commons, seen in nonduality. We have a collective soma just as we have a collective psyche. Spiritual and ecological realities are not separate. As we realize our Cosmic level obligations to attend to the sacred right here in this world, we find that we all share what is indigenous to soul and to soil. We hold it in common.

We can look around the world, and we will not find a culture in which circles primarily indicate fragmentation. Rather, circles indicate wholeness, healing, and even holiness.

Similarly, we find cultures around the world with sacred groves, sacred trees, sacred places with mythopoetic stories. We find a duty of care to the ecologies we all depend on, a practice of reverence for life and respect for all our kin (both human and non-human), and deep practices of gratitude and dignity. We find a dedication to skillful ways of knowing, many if not most of which involve states and styles of consciousness that differ significantly from the states and the styles of consciousness cultivated in the dominant culture.

In short, everywhere we look outside the dominant culture, and even in ancient streams of its history, we find an intimacy with the magic of the world, together with a commitment to educate all citizens so they may directly participate in the life of the world in the most skillful ways possible, so that the culture does its part to cultivate the whole of life onward.

It seems we cannot avoid such a view. We could look at the state of the world and consider the words Jung carved above the door to his home: Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit. It means, “Bidden or unbidden, God will be present.”

How we think of god depends in part on cultural and personal factors. But an impersonal aspect appears here too. The great mystery has its own life and its own imperatives. Living a spiritual or philosophical life means learning to align with them, learning how to let the mystery live itself through us in the most wise, loving, and beautiful ways possible.

That includes facing our shadow.

In this contemplation we will take a little break from our inquiry into magic—or, we might say that, since LoveWisdom goes intimately together with magic as we have considered it, we will look at magic from a very different angle.

But it will feel like taking a break. And over the course of three or four contemplations, we will look into the unconscious and the shadow. We cannot overstate the importance of this topic for all of us.

Because of the significance of the unconscious and the shadow, they have come up many times in our contemplations, including in our contemplation of magic—for instance it came up in our inquiry into Yeats’ first principle of magic.

Magic has gotten pushed into the shadow, and various ideas about magic emerge under the influence of the unconscious. That means even people who have tried to take magic out of the shadow, and who say they believe in it, nevertheless relate to it on the basis of unconscious influences, and we have to do some work to arrive at a more conscious and conscientious sense of magic.

Magic evokes fear, and it evokes the ego’s unconscious defenses. Even if we think we like something—perhaps magic, or science, or anything else—if a threat appears, then the ego has ways to keep us from facing up to reality.

For instance, in science the threat could appear as anomalous data, and the ego promptly writes it off as noise, as coincidence, or something like that.

We will look more directly at the fear we may have about magic, but first we will look at the unconscious and the shadow in a more general way. It affects all of us, and yet the dominant culture as a whole, and we as individuals affected by that culture, in general need to do more to come to terms with our own psyche.

The discovery of the vastness of the psyche demands a shift in everything, from ethics and ecology to politics and art.

The demands of this shift appear in our spiritual practice, often in uncomfortable ways, and I see it with my clients all the time.

It seems essential now more than ever to emphasize that Sophia waits for us in the shadows, and if we don’t seek Her there, then She will leap out of our shadows when we least expect it, and it may cause us a great deal of needless suffering.

However, we actively resist a full acknowledgment of the unconscious.

As I said, in my practice as a philosopher, I see this consistently.

People say the very same things to me, especially in relation to any question or suggestion that might threaten their identity. They don’t know they sound like everyone else.

Like my students in the university, clients say things they experience as unique, as their own thoughts, and so on. They don’t experience it as part of the culture or part of the structure of ego, and they don’t experience it as driven by anything in the unconscious. This is the nature of the unconscious.

We cannot overstate the point that unconscious dynamics are not conscious. They might become so, but at any moment, unconscious dynamics may drive our behavior, and this means that in those moments we have no conscious awareness of how we are being manipulated by our own psyche, and our conscious mind may have all sorts of stories, rationalizations, and so on to explain what we are doing, and to claim that we know what we’re up to.

We need to consider all of this in a caring and compassionate way—lovingly, gracefully, wisely.

We are human beings. We have an unconscious. And yet we often behave as if we don’t, or as if we may have an unconscious, but in this or that moment it cannot possibly influence us in a way that really matters.

Part of the reason we need community has to do with the community’s capacity to see our shadows, to at least sense the possibility that something unconscious might have an influence on us.

Jesus said, where any TWO of you gather, there also am I.

The gathering. That’s part of the meaning of philosophical dialogue. Etymologically, dialogue indicates the way of meaning and the path of gathering.

Many other sages agree with the spirit of what Jesus said. In Buddhist philosophy, all the practitioners of the philosophy take refuge in the community, referred to as the sangha. And the sangha is totally at one with the teachings of the philosophy, and with the example of the fruition of those teachings embodied by the buddha himself. So, where any two gather, there also is the buddha, and maybe Jesus, Confucius, Mohamed, the Peacemaker, Gaia, Aluna, Pachamama, and Sophia.

When I gather with my clients, we gather in a spirit of sacredness, with an openness not only to the presence of the mystery itself, by whatever names we call it, but also with an openness to the presence of the Earth and her countless beings. If we don’t let the wolves and the horses and the forests and oceans speak, we have condemned ourselves to ignorance.

Clients at times have important breakthroughs when they allow themselves to hear the Earth, or a nearby river, or an element such as wind or water. These voices need to come into consciousness by means of the unconscious, and in general unconscious habits and patterns of thought need to become conscious. In countless ways, the unconscious plays a role in our lives.

Nevertheless, sitting with clients, especially in the early stages, I watch them get reactive and defensive, and they say essentially the same things everyone else says, and it all comes down to an assertion that, whatever we were just talking about, they have it under control.

Sometimes I will ask them, “Well, okay, maybe I have misunderstood. Are you enlightened? Are you a saint or a sage or a buddha or something like that?” And they say, “No! Of course not.”

Nevertheless, they tell me about their powerful life experiences, or their business success, or maybe years of therapy, or some wild spiritual experiences, and this apparently should convince both of us that they have something under control, that they know what they’re doing with their life.

And I look at the suffering in their body, and I consider these reactive rationalizations, and I often say to them, “Are you telling me you have no unconscious? Because where we find ourselves here, you seem to be saying you have no unconscious and you are totally enlightened. Is that it?”

And again, they insist that they are not enlightened, and they admit that they have an unconscious. But the admission has no vitality as far as confronting something potentially crucial for their spiritual development.

I want to emphasize that we are talking about something common, not rare or exceptional. If I have any clients listening, then we may have had this kind of interaction, and you may feel angry or embarrassed or annoyed or any number of things, and you might think this is about you. That’s a normal reaction. And it isn’t about you.

Part of the reason people come to me, they eventually realize, has to do with the need for someone else to point out unconscious dynamics at work, and to bear witness to their life in a helpful way.

Our spiritual practice has the capacity to bring unconscious material to light. But the ego can also orchestrate our practice in such a way as to keep us stuck and limited, and this itself is an unconscious process.

Another way to put this, to make it more clear, might go something like this: Unless we are enlightened, unconscious dynamics affect our lives in negative ways. Suffering or samsara or sin—all indicate a way of living in which we ourselves, as well as others affected by our lives—we and they remain victims of our unconscious.

If someone comes to me and admits they are not enlightened, then we face the uncomfortable task of accepting and turning toward the unconscious, because unconscious dynamics go together with our suffering.

Vimalakirti is a touchstone here . . . Vimalakirti appears as a figure of mythical stature in the history of the wisdom traditions of the world.

He had accomplished tremendous spiritual realization, such that he had conquered all demons, attained fearlessness, and also had the power to perform magic.

He was extremely liberated. Not quite the pinnacle of liberation, but very close to it.

In order to help people, especially to help some of Buddha’s most advanced practitioners, Vimalakirti manifested himself as if sick.

This is an important moment of LoveWisdom. It’s one of the finest cases of spiritual common law, and all of us need to reflect on it. I have been meaning to offer a contemplation of Vimalakirti, and we will take that up in a future contemplation, maybe even an addendum to this one.

But for now, let’s just say Vimalakirti was practiced very, very deeply, and had attained a profound realization of wisdom, love, and beauty. On this basis, Vimalakirti manifested himself as sick in order to help people. Hearing that he has fallen ill, many people come to pay their respects and inquire into his health. And in his first teaching in this state, he tells the people gathered that the body is like a magical illusion.

He also tells them that the body of an enlightened being is itself born of wisdom and insight, that it is born of ethics and meditation, love and compassion, joy and equanimity.

After giving some basic teachings on the body, Vimalakirti had the following thought, which he knew the Buddha would hear: He thought, “Hear I am, sick and lying in bed, and the Buddha hasn’t sent anyone to inquire after my health.”

Buddha did in fact hear his thoughts, and he was at that time sitting with his chief disciples. These people were like saints—highly realized beings, and if we met them we might think of them as profoundly enlightened. So think of people in the dominant culture who present themselves as spiritual teachers, and maybe people treat them as if they are like the Buddha, or somehow very close to what the Buddha was. Or think of them like Saint Augustine, or Saint Thomas, or one of the Apostles.

The Buddha first asks one of his very top students named Shariputra. He says, “Shariputra, whill you go check on Vimalakirti for me?”

Shariputra says, “I would rather not do that, Buddha.”

And Buddha says, “Why not?”

And Shariputra says, “Well, one day I was meditating, and Vimalakirti came along, and he told me I wasn’t doing it right, and I had no idea how to respond to him, but after he explained it to me a bunch of people standing around had a big spiritual realization and I was left embarrassed.”

This would be like someone coming to a saint and telling them, “You aren’t praying the right way,” and then explaining it to them in such a way that a bunch of souls were saved, hethens were converted, demons were cast out, and so on.

And Buddha asks each of his most accomplished students to visit Vimalakirti, and each one tells a similar story, about how they were teaching, or meditating, or begging for food, and in every case Vimalakirti tells them they’re doing it wrong, and in the process they become dumbfounded, and meanwhile everyone within earshot becomes more spiritually awakened.

Vimalakirti has by this point realized that these people are avoiding him, and now he has to get the Buddha to bring them so he can give them further instructions.

And we see in this story a direct recognition that a person can think of themselves as wise, compassionate, and spiritual evolved, and others may see them that way too, and nevertheless, they may have unconscious blocks to further spiritual insight. These supposedly sagely beings needed someone else to come along to point out their unconscious blocks, and when that happened, they at first went into a reactive mode, and they wanted to avoid the situation.

All of us face these same dynamics, and most of us have not arrived at the level of the best of Buddha’s students.

When we think about Vimalakirti, and we think about how embarrassed these sagely beings felt, it gives added context to the way Freud framed the unconscious as a tremendous blow to the ego.

Freud spoke of three great blows to the western ego: The discovery made by Copernicus that Earth is not the center of the universe, the discovery made by Darwin that we are not the center of life, and his own discovery that the ego is not the whole of the psyche—in some ways, not even the center of psychic life.

Of course, Freud didn’t really discover this, as the story of Vimalakirti illustrates. Most spiritual traditions have their ways of getting at the unconscious. Freud just put it in a way the post-Cartesian mind could begin to understand.

Freud’s sense of the unconscious vastly expanded the landscape of the soul. Our soul is not just what we’re consciously aware of. Freud’s work gives us the image of an iceberg, where our conscious ego emerges as the very tip of something much, much bigger. The massive body of the iceberg floats under the surface. We don’t sense it, but it’s the most of us.

Jung’s discoveries further expanded our psyche, because Jung carried us from a vision of a merely personal unconscious to a vision of a collective unconscious. Where Freud offered us a sense that the ego was the tip of a vast iceberg, Jung put us in touch with the ocean in which all our personal psyches float.

The work of Grof, Maslow, and other western psychologists expanded the cartography of the soul further still, putting us in touch with the Earth that hosts those oceans, and even in touch with the Cosmos itself.

That’s an extraordinarily vast sense of the soul, far exceeding the personal experience of the ego. We sometimes refer to this trend as transpersonal, but that word can confuse us.

What we really mean is that the personal itself is transpersonal. If we have a Freudian view of ourselves, and some asks us to point at ourselves, we can point at our body or our skull, and that response can make sense.

But once we discover the insights of Jung, Maslow, Grof, and other psychologists, if someone asks us to point at ourselves, we can only laugh. We realize that what we are is not localizable. The personal spreads out into spaces we might not have imagined, and the self becomes a more confusing concept.

Each of the expansions, even Freud’s, came with skepticism that only increased as the expansion blew open our preconceived notions. The Pauli-Jung conjecture alone—which we usually refer to as the notion of synchronicity—that idea, and especially our experience of it, ruptures the boundaries of space, time, and psyche in ways our current paradigm finds unacceptable.

By the time we get to Grof’s suggestions, we have left the bounds of reality as we find it in the dominant paradigm. We’re talking here about the cultural paradigm, because even in hard science the findings support a more revolutionary view than most scientists will allow, since they remain captured by the bad philosophy of their culture.

The spiritual traditions already existed outside those bounds, and western psychology only seems to play a game of catch-up.

The vast landscape of the soul explored by the psychnauts of Indo-Tibetan tantra as well as various streams of shamanic and other indigenous spiritualities boggles the mind. Failure to take this expanded landscape of the psyche into account can only limit our creativity, and not challenging an implicitly narrow cartography of the soul does a disservice to ourselves and to others.

LoveWisdom has to do with awakening. This often relates to leaving the bounded, habitual mind, entering unknown and unconscious territory, and making it conscious, thereby experiencing an expansion of our being and our vision.

We can’t enjoy liberation while driven about by unconscious dynamics—especially incoherent ones—and our creativity, too, finds a fuller freedom in an expansive cosmic experience and vision.

The unconscious plays an unavoidable role in our lives as human beings, as artists, as parents, as concerned citizens, and so on in all our roles. When we fail to deal with the unconscious we create suffering for ourselves and others.

As Jung put it, “The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.” I see this with my clients, and we can all see it with friends, and certainly in the political and economic realm.

This rule applies in all sorts of life situations, and we may find that what appears like an “accident” over which we had no control . . . if we could reflect deeply enough, perhaps with the help of a guide, and often only by means of certain arts of awareness that would allow us to see it, we might find a troubling synchronicity, an unsettling sense that the “accident” was no mere accident.

In other words, we may insist that some careless driver ran a red light and hit us, and there was nothing we could do. It was an act of fate. But Jung tells us we need to look more deeply and with greater care.

If we expand that sensibility we come to the following insight:

In the most general sense, the state of the world reflects the state of our souls.

However, while Jung would certainly agree with this general feeling for his point, he also intended a more focused kind of meaning that in turn applies broadly to the dominant culture. If you can look up the passage, you might enjoy it.

It might prove even more helpful if we could place it in a mandala along with insights from philosophers such as Wendell Berry, Paul Shepard, John Dewey, Arthur Bentley, the Dalai Lama, Dogen, a wide variety of indigenous philosophers, and many others—each in turn representative of wider ecologies of mind.

To find the passage from Jung, you can look in his collected works, in volume 9, part 2, starting around paragraph 126, in Volume 11, starting around paragraph 519, and also in his Memories, Dream, Reflections.

Jung speaks of the irreconcilable nature of the opposites in Christian psychology. Our dualistic thinking sets itself up as permanently dualistic, because one side of the dualism gets moral approval, and the other side gets moral condemnation.

Can we sense how that might work? If dualistic thoughts create suffering and all sorts of negative effects in the world, like economic inequality, ecological degradation, racism, patriarchy, and so on, we might heal those things if we could heal the dualistic thoughts.

But if the dualism presents itself in moral terms, then we face the added trouble that one side of the duality seems morally correct, and thus the duality reinforces itself. How do we move forward without becoming unethical?

If we think of the Yin and Yang of Daoism, we can think about their characteristics without condemning one or the other. Yin has its place, and without Yin we cannot have Yang, and Yang cannot function without Yin.

Jung saw humanity split in two, and in deep need to heal the divide. Here on Turtle Island, we can see this split so clearly in the political circus, in which Red and Blue do not relate to each other as complimentary viewpoints, but as enemies—and moral enemies at that.

The language of the Red side has it that, if the Blue team wins, it means the death of America, the death of freedom, the death of Christmas, the death of motherhood and families and baseball and apple pie, and Satan himself will soon take over, because the Blue team is evil and will allow evil to prevail.

The Blue side does no better, for it views the Red team as backward, aggressive, racist, and so on, and thus it sees the Red team as unethical just as the Red team sees them as unethical.

It may seem shocking to question the label of racism, but this shows how the tension in the soul plays out. Something inside us seeks the moral outrage in the behavior on the other side of the divide, and the opposites take on a moral character that solidifies the apparent space between them.

Jung wants us to see how the moral separation of opposites makes perfect sense. We create and maintain these irreconcilable opposites in part by giving them compelling rationalizations. One group thinks the Red team cannot win because they are white supremacists. The other group thinks the Blue team cannot win because they are godless socialists. We see the unethical behavior of the other side, and this reinforces the duality.

The duality and our judgements about it seem natural and self-evident, because we have gotten captured by shadows and archetypes, and our neurotic complex seems to reveal reality rather than delusion. If we could clearly see the places where delusion has us, we would never suffer, and we wouldn’t do so many ignorant and unskillful things.

Strangely, Jung invites us into a unity of opposites, but says our ignorance makes us feel “undivided”.

In other words, our divided soul will doom us—but we live as if unaware of the division. We’re not talking about something theoretical. This has to do with our daily life.

We can live in such a way that we pretend we have no incoherence in us, no conflict in the soul. We might admit conflict or challenges in some areas, but we leave out others, or we leave out the real core of the conflict and try to locate it somewhere else, where we feel safer dealing with it.

Meanwhile, we remain unconscious of the division in us, of its true nature and full extent, and this means we live as if undivided, even though a division has us in its grasp.

This “undivided” state of ignorance and neurosis simply masks a deeper division which we must heal. Thus, we must become conscious of the division already there, and allow a spontaneous healing response.

The healing cannot happen while the shadow remains repressed and largely unconscious.

Shadow means the parts of ourselves that we reject, deny, or even do not know. We may, for instance, deny our anger. We may think of ourselves as “not at all an angry person,” and yet anger might seethe under the surface of our psyche, and we may remain unconscious of it.

The movie Anger Management actually does a nice job of engaging with anger as a shadow. Typically written off as a trite “buddy” film, we may arrive at significant spiritual insight if we watch the film as if Jack Nicholson’s character were a Zen Master, and Adam Sandler were playing our own self—as if the movie were “about” our own life. Adam Sandler’s character seems easy going and not inclined to anger, and yet we find out that this character has a lot of anger in the shadow.

The shadow can be anything we reject, so that means the things we hated in our parents or other figures of prominence or authority in our past may end up there in some form, leaving our functioning degraded.

One parent may have seemed too “soft” or too “sensitive,” and so our empathy, compassion, and sensitivity go into the shadow.

Another parent may have seemed angry, and so our capacity for fierceness coupled with mirror-like wisdom goes into the shadow, as well as a great deal of repressed anger, which means an encumbered wisdom and fierceness that drives us unconsciously.

Shame could end up in the shadow, which means we may find it hard to face criticism, or that we may find it hard to admit wrongdoing and errors, or we engage in a lot of catastrophizing when we do something wrong.

Fear could end up there, so that we cannot admit our anxiety, cannot face how frightened we feel about the state of the world, the state of our relationships, or our own future.

Ill-intentions may end up in the shadow, and so we find ourselves constantly insisting on our good intentions.

Low self-esteem might end up in the shadow, thus leading to overconfidence on a conscious level, arrogance toward others, a significant level of self-sabotage, and/or interpersonal issues such as needing to be found attractive or sexually desired.

Both positive and negative qualities can end up in the shadow. And in any case, acceptance of ourselves and the shadow offers the only path to healing.

Jung was a great healer of souls, and his own experience taught him that we cannot change anything unless we accept it. We have to accept reality first, and that full acceptance means full awareness. The medicine of awareness itself heals all our psychic ills.

But acceptance presents many challenges. We have a tendency to condemn. In a way, suffering means being trapped in a never-ending cycle of praise and blame.

But condemnation can never heal or liberate us. The attitude of condemnation oppresses. We see this politically all the time, and it plays out on a personal and interpersonal level as well.

When we blame, we think we see clearly, and we think we have located the source of a problem. But this carries a tragic irony, because the real problem goes together with the whole cycle of praise and blame.

Isn’t that comical? When we blame, that very activity keeps us locked in a way of relating that fundamentally involves bondage and ignorance. Blame perpetuates suffering, even as we try to use it to fix our suffering.

This doesn’t mean we turn ourselves into a doormat or that we stand by and let people commit evil. But it means the cycle of praise and blame itself presences a kind of evil in the world, and that praise and blame will not alleviate our suffering.

Instead, the very fact of our suffering offers us a way out. A spiritual life teaches us how our suffering unites us. When we see others as just like ourselves, we can stop condemning them. We can realize that other people want to be happy, and just like us they often do a bad job of it. We are so much like our supposed enemies that we could all just relax a bit if we would stop condemning each other.

But we cannot stop condemning others if we have not accepted ourselves.

There we find the keystone, the central issue, the heart of the matter.

Jung wisely called self-acceptance the acid test of our whole philosophy of life.

What a suggestion. Isn’t it remarkable?

Self-acceptance is the acid test of our whole philosophy of life—Not the acid test of our concepts, but the acid test of our level of realization, the acid test for how well we have lived a skillful, graceful, and realistic philosophy of life;

Jung pointed out that we could do lots of nice things, like feeding a starving child or forgiving an insult giving a homeless person a blanket. And Jesus specifically spoke of how we treat the least of these—That already presents so many problems in our divided society.

The United States has a strong Christian sentiment, but an almost impossible time treating the least of these with wisdom, love, and beauty. Compassion seems lacking in so many cases.

But Jung asks us a most disturbing question. He says, What if we find ourselves in a situation in which the least of these is ourself?

If we look honestly and deeply, and we ask how profoundly we accept ourselves, we may find that the starving child we most urgently need to feed and the enemy we most urgently need to forgive is ourself. And if we continue to look with care, we may find that a key reason why we have starving children and homeless people in the first place has to do with our lack of self-acceptance.

That may seem counterintuitive, but the limit of our self-acceptance marks a limit in our acceptance of life itself, and it will always create a barrier between ourselves and others. The limit of our self-compassion marks a limit of our compassion for others. We cannot get around this problem.

This in turn relates to wholeness and the unconscious.

In his Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung writes about the shadow and the great need for psychological sophistication at this unprecedented historical moment—which has only gotten worse since Jung published that book.

Jung points out there that, generally speaking, people remain so unconscious, so asleep in their lives and driven by confused and unconscious patterns, that we fail to see our own potentials, and that means every time we make a decision, we fail to sense all the possibilities available.

In some sense, we make decisions all the time, ceaselessly. Often they seem to have little consequence, but even the small decisions add up, and they either perpetuate our ignorance and the ignorance of our culture, or they might liberate us.

Because life is subtle and complex and loaded with uncertainties, we end up looking outside ourselves for rules, regulations, opinions, and guidance of any kind to help us deal with the feeling of groundlessness and uncertainty, the impermanence of things and our inability to control and manipulate the world.

We do this because our culture lacks any rootedness in wisdom, love, and beauty. Our education does not teach us how to get in touch with our own soul and how to listen to the soul of the world and the sacred powers and inconceivable causes that make all things happen. Our culture doesn’t teach us what our mind is and how to use it. We don’t learn about the nature of mind and the mind of Nature.

So, we mainly get in education a style of consciousness and collection of beliefs that will perpetuate the pattern of insanity that already has us and the world in its grips.

We don’t learn what a truly ethical life would look like or what a truly healthy mind and world are like, and we don’t receive an education on how to live an ethical and vitalizing life that rejuvenates the world and practices the whole of life onward.

But we do get a variety of abstract notions, many of them conflicting, and few of which we can live up to.

We look around, and we see evil in the world. We see real harms. Yet our education has given us no good way to understand evil, and no reliable way to live a truly good life that doesn’t create suffering for others.

To understand evil and to understand how to live a good life means nothing less than self-knowledge—as in the old imperative of LoveWisdom to know thyself.

This in turn means knowledge of our own wholeness and the wholeness of life—which means the holiness of life and the sacredness of our own soul and the ecologies that sustain us.

The relation between self-acceptance, self-knowledge, and the shadow is crucial—absolutely crucial. The shadow is everything we do not know about ourselves on a personal level—everything. That means good things and bad things. Therefore it means things that exist as capacities and potentials but we have not cultivated them. For instance, true compassion remains in the shadow for most people. They may experience a lot of empathy, but compassion remains in the shadow, because it requires practice and more self-knowledge.

Magic remains in the shadow as well, though with both magic and compassion we touch on things that go beyond the shadow, because there are things about us that are unknown but not really personal in the narrow egoic sense. The larger unconscious dimensions of ourselves are in some ways impersonal, and in some ways neither personal nor impersonal.

In terms of the shadow, we are talking about more personal material. For instance, outwardly we may be very happy, caring people, and we may even think of ourselves that way. We may say, “I love everyone, and I don’t feel hatred toward anyone. And I’m basically a happy go lucky person.” Meanwhile, the shadow contains hatred and despair. We would remain unconscious of it. So, we aren’t lying when we say that we don’t feel hatred and we generally feel happy. The hatred and despair get totally repressed, and we remain unconscious of them. But they do not simply relax in the unconscious. Rather, they have real effects in our lives. We have to be able to accept these repressed aspects of ourselves, and that also means accepting the unconscious to begin with.

We cannot have self-acceptance if we lack self-knowledge. So, self-acceptance means not only accepting the things we know about ourselves, but finding out about ourselves and remaining compassionate toward what we discover, and doing the work to liberate encumbered energies. We try to remain friendly toward these energies, but compassion sometimes demands fierceness too, in order to liberate the energies. In other words, Self-acceptance doesn’t mean we discover our anger and then start hating people, or that we discover our anger and coddle it. Rather it means facing and knowing our anger so completely that it becomes unencumbered, and that can require us to take on a fierceness. Indeed, unencumbered anger may manifest as compassionate fierceness, but it may also manifest as mirror-like wisdom. Anger often indicates that something needs to be seen clearly, and if we just allow the clarity of a mirror, reflecting things as they are, we don’t need any fierceness, and we certainly don’t need the heat and aggression of anger.

In general, then, self-knowledge is key to shadow work, and thus a meditative mind along with the practice of compassion are keys to shadow work.

We must know thoroughly what Cosmic-level goodness we can accomplish, how much wisdom, love, and beauty we can bring into the world.

And we must also know clearly what terrible things we are capable of doing. We have to be honest with ourselves, and get beyond all self-deception.

But Jung found the people of the dominant culture profoundly ill-equipped to live without self-deception and delusion,

profoundly ill-equipped for knowing ourselves and realizing our greatest potential.

Keep in mind that he studied the psyche of the dominant culture with great care, that he had hundreds of patients and students, many of whom had the best education available, and many of whom had accomplished much in their lives.

And so he had the same experience Socrates had. Socrates went around to the best and brightest of his culture, and when he questioned them, he found them caught in delusion and self-deception, and he found they did not know the true nature of reality or the true nature of their own mind.

If we don’t know what we are, how can we ever think we can fulfill our potential and live skillfully and realistically?

If we don’t know what we are, we don’t know our own nature and capacity. It would be like getting into the cockpit of a spaceship with no idea at all about what it is, not even knowing that it can fly, let alone that it can fly across galaxies.

Sacred powers and inconceivable causes flow through us,

right through and as our body and mind—

they flow in our very heart and soul—

and these powers and patterns already direct all the decisions of our lives. When we do not know them and do not know how to live well with them, they direct our lives into incoherence and suffering.

In other words, we actively misknow and misuse ourselves and our world. That seems to capture the fundamental point of the wisdom traditions and of Jung’s psychology.

And Jung particularly wanted us to see how we may think we pursue conscious purposes, but meanwhile unconscious factors direct our lives. If we keep living under the yoke of our own unconscious and the unconscious of our culture, we create major problems for ourselves, for each other, and for the whole community of life.

Habitually, we operate as if we can pursue our conscious purposes, but our way of thought, speech, and action is both controlled by unconscious factors and also out of attunement with Nature, out of alignment with reality itself. All our conscious notions fail to capture the fullness of ourselves and the wholeness of reality.

This helps us understand the profound need for a spiritual orientation to life, because a spiritual orientation means a commitment to let go of all our beliefs and to gain genuine intimacy with the nature of our own mind, heart, body, and world. Beliefs as propositions fit into our consciousness. They are just notions, not reality.

The discovery of the unconscious, especially the expanded cartography of the soul we find in Jung and further in transpersonal psychology—that expanded landscape of the soul invites us back to each other, back to the community of life, back to a sense of humility and awe. It invites us to surrender to sacredness, and to enter the heart of wonder, to enter the magic and mystery of our total interwovenness, the inconceivable wholeness of the Cosmos.

In our next contemplation, we’ll look a little further into the shadow and talk about some basic things we can do to start working with it.

In the meantime, if you have questions, reflections, or stories about the unconscious and the ways it can derail our plans and destabilize our egos, send them in through wlb.org, and we might consider them in a future contemplation. Until then, this is 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.