Part 2 in a short series. The dominant culture tends to trivialize many of the spiritual teachings and practices that present a threat to it, or a threat to the egos within it. We get McMindfulness because a genuine practice of meditation, as part of a holistic and skillful philosophy of life, results in citizens who want nothing to do with many of the core practices of the dominant culture.

Shadow work runs the risk of the same kind of trivialization, such that we'll end up nibbling on McShadow nuggets and thinking we've confronted the vastness of the psyche. Meanwhile, the pattern of insanity will continue to unfold.

In this contemplation we try to consider a few things about the shadow and the psyche that help us to understand its importance, and to get some sense of the consequences of any kind of avoidance on our part of the sometimes unpleasant or even frightening work of freeing ourselves from deception—both self-deception and the deceptions of the dominant culture.

The Dangerous Soul: The Psyche Is Vaster Than We Realize

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 magic. If you haven’t heard this series, I think you’re in for a treat. It’s like a box of wisdom donuts—paleo superfood wisdom donuts 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 magic.

Last time we spoke, we introduced the notion of the shadow.

It seems essential to recognize that the shadow presents a greater challenge than we may at first understand, and in the dominant culture, we tend to talk about these things almost as a matter of trivializing them it’s as if that’s our intention. Some of the things we have discussed in these contemplations should be treated as sacred.

Some of the things that I am willing to talk about as a philosopher might appear as esoteric in some traditions. That is to say we would have to go through initiation to talk about them in any real way.

And people would reliably go through that, because we hunger for initiation so much.

So many of the dumb things that we have done in our lives, don’t just come from ignorance as such or ignorance all by itself, but they come from the soul’s recognition of our ignorance, and the energy it puts into us to seek initiation, in order to become liberated from ignorance.

Many of the silly things and even unethical things we do come from the ego’s attempts at ignoring the soul’s calling, going against the soul’s calling, or projecting the soul’s calling onto situations, objects, or people the ego feels comfortable pursuing.

Sometimes the soul seems to push us into these ridiculous and painful situations because the ego just won’t let go, and only by getting ourselves into humiliating or impossible circumstances can we experience the kind of initiation that could loosen the ego’s grip enough for us to wake up a little.

In general, a lot of the stupid things that we’ve done in our lives—the relationships we got into that we shouldn’t have got into, the sky diving trips and the vacations to Patagonia and Bora Bora to go on the yoga retreat—all the things that we’ve done, some of them which appeared to be good, some of them which really appeared to be quite ignorant, reckless, even unethical . . .

a lot of it had to do with the soul’s hunger for initiation and its drive to find some place, some time—trying to find sacred space and time, trying to enter into the liminal, to cross the threshold and enter into the unconscious, enter into the shadow, uncover the treasures there and bring them back to the world to heal ourselves to reincorporate.

We seek for—we hunger for—initiation. And this means we hunger for wisdom, love, and beauty. Initiation into the mysteries of life means initiation into greater wisdom, love, and beauty.

We seek liberation from our ignorance, and entrance into the mysteries of life,

and a healthy culture would provide for this, as fundamental to the well-being of the culture, which means fundamental to the well-being of Nature, and fundamental to the well-being of humans and the community of life.

Initiation brings us into attunement with the nature of mind and the mind of Nature.

A culture cannot realize health, wholeness, and holiness without providing sacred time and sacred space, and pathways of initiation that allow us to enter scared time and space to cut through delusion and become whole.

A culture cannot become whole without individuals in the culture becoming whole.

And so we do a lot of ignorant things because we can’t find initiation in this culture. We can’t arrive at it.

And we have so much ignorance about the unconscious and about the shadow that we don’t realize how vast, how intimidated we should feel, by the unknown, the unconscious and the shadow.

And so conversations about the shadow tend toward trivialization because that’s what sustains the culture, keeping these things at Bay.

We don’t recognize that, given its stature given, the relationship between the ego and the rest of the psyche, we should feel some fear and trembling and the presence of the unconscious.

And so we face this paradox that on the one hand we’re hungry for initiation. On the other hand, of course the ego doesn’t really want a real initiation because that would be an ordeal—a frightening ordeal.

So together, here and now, we deal with, with both of these things. When we talk about the shadow, and about the need to inquire into the shadow, We’re talking ultimately about the need for initiation

A healthy therapeutic relationship can provide some of that context, working with a really skilled therapist, a skilled therapist who understands the vastness of the psyche, or working with a philosopher who understands such things, we could

undergo an initiation, an initiatory experience,

But we need to pursue it with care. People can talk about it as if it were easy. People say, “Oh, I’m all ready for shadow work.” Or. “I’m all ready for initiation.”

And yes, the soul hungers for it. And at the same time, the ego is afraid of it. And if we don’t recognize the ego’s fears, and acknowledge those fears, and do the work to prepare ourselves, then we won’t get everything out of it that we could and we’ll end up doing work that might feel good—and in fact, might be good, some important things will come out and we’ll learn from it—but we can also leave some significant self-deceptions in place, and those will also tend to keep the whole pattern of insanity of the culture going.

Our shadow work has vast implications now, because entire ecologies and whole species hang in the balance, and if we let our self-deceptions continue, it means real suffering for countless human and non-human beings.

For instance, from the standpoint of a real commitment to not merely believe, the assumption that the Cosmos is made only of something called “matter” is nothing more than a belief. Among other things, we really don’t know what this so-called “matter” is.

Only a split-second ago, so to speak, we discovered that everything we can see in the visible universe is but 5% of the “stuff” that exists. We still don’t know what that other 95% is, and we do not know the full story of the 5%.

Moreover, we find several even more extraordinary insights here. First of all, we now have a new sense of the whole. Before, we believed we knew 100% of the matter, but we found out that we only saw only 5%. So now we have that 5% plus a strange new 95%, and that gives us a new 100% that we think we know.

However, what if that new 100% is itself merely another fraction of a still larger whole. So, the 5% “visible matter” plus the 95% “dark matter and dark energy” might not add up to 100% of what exists, but that might itself be a mere 2% or 10% or 50% of another Whole that western science has not even vaguely guessed at. For all we know the dark matter is the real stuff, so to speak, and dark beings might have created the visible 5% as part of their evolution, to find out how the Cosmos feels in the framework of time.

That might be speculation, but what isn’t speculation is that we have never found some “thing” that itself, for certain, does not break down when the right kinds of energy and analysis are applied to it. We haven’t found the bottom, so to speak. We can’t grasp the 5%, let alone the 95%, and it seems that reality is not even composed of matter at all, but actually of ephemeral events, magical happenings that have no solidity to them except in a relative sense.

Indeed, we have even found that we don’t fully understand phenomena we thought we knew rather well. An astrophysicist named Brian Fields responded to a recent mystery about our very own sun by saying, “It’s amazing that we were so spectacularly wrong about something we should understand really well . . .”

We could get carried away with many examples like this. Instead let’s circle back to allow the full sense of the basic Cosmic situation to land. We have found out that 95% of the Cosmos was totally invisible to us—and in some sense it still is. For some of what exists in the Cosmos, we can find ways to detect the effects of it, and yet we may not ever see it directly.

We can find ways to detect the presence of something invisible to our eyes, and thus we can know of its presence.

Nevertheless, for the longest time we may remain unconscious of it—which, we must emphasize again and again, means not conscious. We had no conscious awareness of dark energy, and only recently noticed its effects.

All of this illustrates how our soul is, how our mind and heart are, how our own body and world are, and how our lives are: We think we see, and we say, “I see!” and yet we remain unconscious of so very much.

When we look at ourselves or another person, or when someone else looks at us or looks at themselves, perhaps we only perceive 5% of what we are, and 95% of us—perhaps even more than that—remains unconscious and unknown.

Most essentially, we do not look at ourselves, at others, or at reality and perceive their true nature. As with the sun, the conscious ego is something we might think we should understand, but we likely do not. And then we have another 95% of ourselves about which we may know almost nothing.

We might feel some compassion for our poor little ego here. It thinks of itself as the center of everything, as yet it floats like a small planet in a vast solar system or even a galaxy. We tend to speak as if our ego has a soul, but in reality our soul has an ego as the Milky Way galaxy has a planet Earth.

If we try to know this 95% of ourselves that for now remains unconscious, we may face some challenges. For instance, if what we are is not an object, it can never become an object of perception, and thus we cannot know it in the way that we try to know other objects, such as the sun—and part of what we have considered is that even what we think of as objects may not be objects in the way they would have to be if we were to come to know them in the ways we usually try.

Think of the upheaval in science and thought that this implies. It suggests we need better ways of knowing and being, living and loving. And it suggests our habitual ways of doing these things could create a lot of suffering.

When we say, “I see”—this is itself part of our active misknowing of reality. This means what we think of as knowledge precisely stands in the way of insight, wisdom, and broader potentials.

And our habitual tendency to think we know and to operate on the basis of conscious purposes serve to perpetuate our ignorance, and it keeps us unconscious of the presence of the unconscious and unconscious of the mind of Nature and the nature of our own mind.

To begin to see more, we could try to sense the effects of something that has a significant or even a subtle influence on us, but which we know is not within our consciousness. That presents some challenges, but we could face those challenges. And then we could admit that we do have an unconscious, and that the unconscious affects our lives, that it affects our decisions and actions and thoughts. Gradually, we may be able to make some of the unconscious material conscious, and then we can truly mature, especially if we do this as integral to a holistic practice of coming to know the mind of Nature and the nature of mind.

So far we have placed ourselves more conscientiously in a context that includes the unconscious and the unknown in general. This not only matters more than we may at first realize, but in fact it presents a far greater challenge than we realize.

Nothing could be easier than to say we accept the unconscious and the unknown. Indeed, people love to hide behind the unknown, as when we challenge someone else’s views on things. It’s fine to refer to the unknown when the ego feels unthreatened in the process. But for the ego to genuinely confront the fact that it cannot manipulate and control reality presents existential threat.

Even a cursory glance at the self-help and new age marketplace reveals a veneration of sovereignty. It often gets spiritualized, but if we reflect with care, we can notice that we want to have a sense of control and a sense that we are master’s of our own destiny.

The wisdom traditions teach us a more subtle kind of realization, in which we enter into the nonduality of the individual and the collective, the nonduality of unity and diversity, the nonduality of the known and the unknown.

There is no such thing as an independent, self-sufficient being, and rather ironically, people who otherwise celebrate our interwovenness and the holism of life will also try to assert an image of individualism and self-sovereignty.

Nietzsche critiqued the dominant culture’s notion of the sovereign individual, pointing out that the dominant culture needs us to have this belief so that it can prosecute us for wrongdoing, and we can also see the need for this belief so that the culture can rationalize inequalities inherent to the system as faults of individual character.

In other words, you aren’t poor or otherwise marginalized because the system itself creates injustice, inequality, and aggression. Rather, you are poor or otherwise marginalized because you don’t work hard enough, or you don’t have an abundance mindset or a growth mindset, or you have some other limiting beliefs. We get the dogma that anyone can win at this game, and the dogma says our resistance and our failures have nothing to do with systemic issues in the game itself.

Our soul may have no interest in the game, and it may self-sabotage precisely because it rejects the whole game, and we refuse to listen.

But let’s not miss the larger point: Once we let the reality of the unconscious sink in, we get quite shaken, and we realize we need a truly healthy culture in order to deal with the unconscious, and that no individual can deal with life AS an individual, pretending they have conscious control over vast processes that will never submit to our conscious agendas.

With this kind of sensibility, we can appreciate that philosophy as a science means just about what we mean by ecology, psychology, and cosmology taken together. If we had a cosmological and ecological psychology, that would be the most direct kind of philosophical science.

And Jung wanted to say that we do need a scientific approach to our mind and to Nature—which means a spiritual approach.

Again, spiritual means a commitment to find out for ourselves rather than merely to believe, along with a commitment to getting beyond our self-deception and personal agendas, which also means getting beyond our unconscious agendas.

Spirituality therefore means a commitment to know what we are, to really find out what we are and what the nature of reality is. And when we look, we discover things about ourselves that we share with all human beings, and also things we share with all sentient beings and even the whole of the Cosmos.

In our last contemplation, we considered Jung, because he gave us the term shadow, and he also gave us an even vaster sense of the psyche than we see in Freud’s work.

Jung thought of self-knowledge in particular as psychology. There he quite consciously aligned himself with the philosophers of old, and he rightly thought of his work as the work of a philosopher. Jung understood the wisdom traditions as psychological, as oriented to healing the soul and realizing its potential by understanding the true nature of mind and reality.

He realized that no serious psychologist could avoid the issue of self-knowledge, and that psychology could not fully heal people if it didn’t help them arrive at self-knowledge. And he understood that this kind of self-knowledge is precisely what the philosophers of all times have sought, and what the philosophical traditions promise us.

Jung tried to help people see that we need psychology more than ever, that in fact it has become a matter of life and death. Our ignorance regarding our own true nature has led the world to ecological catastrophe, grave nuclear threat, and deepening inequality, and ongoing injustice. But in seeing the need for meaningful psychology, Jung simply recognized the need for skillful philosophy.

Without good philosophy, without skillful and realistic LoveWisdom, we often find ourselves confused, or we find ourselves clinging to opinions that cover over our ignorance.

For instance, In Jung’s time, he pointed out that people found Nazism and Stalinism totally perplexing. How did Nazism happen? How did those people come to power, and how did a terrible genocide and a world war unfold as it did?

We may have some opinions, but Jung felt that almost no one had a very good understanding of these phenomena, because almost no one had a significant understanding of themselves, of the psyche itself in its individual and collective manifestations.

In the present historical context, we find ourselves in the same situation, but with much higher stakes. As we keep reminding ourselves, the fate of many species hangs in the balance, and that includes the human species.

People may claim to know what’s going on or how to fix it all. Conservatives of every variety profess all sorts of things about godless liberals, and the liberals profess all sorts of things about the reactive conservatives.

People storm a state capitol or the national congress, while many citizens look on in horror, but also in confusion, or in some form of false knowledge.

Again, some of us may think we know what’s going on, but Jung invites us to open to the possibility that we have a fragmented and deluded understanding of ourselves and others.

If we could really learn about the psyche, about the soul, we would not only understand things much more clearly, but things themselves would be different—WE would be different.

The world we see depends on the quality of our soul. We could not get the inequality, injustice, and ecocide we see without confused and disordered souls. We see phenomena in the world that reasonably qualify as evil, and that can shock us. The basic question of evil can shake us in our core. How can we destroy ecologies? How can we allow war to continue? How can we allow children to starve?

Jung tried to help us to see that when we find ourselves standing before the terrifying question of evil, we don’t really know what stands before us, and we have no idea what to do with it, how to face it.

He specifically highlights the question, “How could this happen here?” a question many U.S. citizens have asked themselves about so many problems, so many gratuitous sufferings, not least of which a raid on the U.S. Capitol building or the murder of unarmed and often totally innocent people, killings at times perpetrated by the police or the military, whom we may think of as tasked to protect the peaceful and the innocent, and to take a stand for what is right and good.

So, to say it plainly again, we find real evils in the world. And the problem of evil involves our ignorance of evil and our ignorance of our own psyche.

Evil has us. That we can see. It is evil to oppress people. It is evil when 84% of indigenous women here on Turtle Island experience violence in their lifetime, that the murder rate for indigenous women is 10 or more times higher than for white women, and that thousands and thousands of indigenous women are murdered or go missing every year.

It’s evil when innocent, unarmed black people get killed by the police. It’s evil how many black people live under the tyranny of the prison-industrial complex.

It’s evil when corporations degrade ecologies and destroy the conditions of life. It’s evil when a small handful of people, maybe 10 or 12 at most, have as much wealth as billions of human beings combined, especially when so many of those billions don’t have ready access to clean water, good food, and so on—and they often lack these things as part of the way the wealthy obtain and maintain their incredible wealth.

We can go on and on.

It’s not that the billionaires or the police ARE evil, as if their essence is evil, but that evil HAS them in at least some of their activities in the world—at it has them in those activities because of widespread ignorance about our own psyche and the nature of evil.

It’s a situation we can heal. We don’t have to remain stuck like this.

But we won’t overcome evil by thinking we can trample it, as if we need no training and education, as if we can just will evil to be gone or fight it by means of violence, which just means adding more evil to the world. We can’t fight evil by trying to get rich either. That, too, ends up creating more evil.

Jung realized that the problem of evil for us—and the problem of our ignorance about our own soul, our own body, mind, and world—has to do with the terrible weakening of the mythopoetic dimension of our culture. Vitalizing mythology has gone almost out of existence, and we only have the incoherent stories of economics, our fragmented sciences and politics, and our misguided mass media.

Mythology as the creative expression of a philosophy of life used to guide the life of individuals and communities. We have lost that guidance, and we now have a flood of really bad philosophy that largely perpetuates our suffering.

Jung felt that we do have workable mythologies, but that, ironically, they too have ended up in the shadow of our psyche.

Jung points out that we could work with Christian stories for instance. He takes the example of when Jesus said, “Be you therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” And Jung just asks simple questions: Why would human beings need the cunning of serpents? And what is the link between this cunning and the innocence of the dove?

Then Jung considers the phrase, “Except you become as little children…” And he asks a serious question: Who really observes and gains insight from what children are like in reality? Do we really know the nature of youth and youthfulness, or do we merely THINK we know these things?

Jung himself struggled with this. Let’s consider a marvelous short passage from his record of the visionary journey he took into his own soul. Jung writes,

I had to recognize that I am only the expression and symbol of the soul. In the sense of the spirit of the depths, I am as I am in this visible world a symbol of my soul, and I am thoroughly a serf, completely subjugated, utterly obedient. The spirit of the depths taught me to say: “I am the servant of a child.” Through this dictum I learn above all the most extreme humility, as what I most need.

The spirit of this time of course allowed me to believe in my reason. He let me see myself in the image of a leader with ripe thoughts. But the spirit of the depths teaches me that I am a servant, in fact the servant of a child. This dictum was repugnant to me and I hated it.

But I had to recognize and accept that my soul is a child and that my God in my soul is a child.

In our last contemplation on magic, we inquired into patterning and we considered Yeats’ third principle of magic that says the great mind and great memory of Nature and of the Cosmos can be evoked by symbols.

We considered Jung’s suggestion that we ourselves ARE a patterning—not an object, but a patterning, a happening or constellation of happenings.

Here Jung approaches the same idea from a slightly different angle, and it can open our minds and hearts if we let it: The body is a symbol, a patterning of the soul. The body is not what we are, but a symbol of what we are. We get so confused about embodiment.

We can also recall Vimalakirti here . . . he manifested himself as sick in order to help people. When people heard he had fallen ill, they went 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, and that the body of an enlightened being is born of wisdom and insight, born of ethics and meditation, love and compassion, joy and equanimity.

And here Jung says the body is a magic, which we can think of as conjured from wisdom, love, and beauty, or conjured from ignorance, fragmentation, aggression, clinging, craving, hoping, fearing, and so on.

The body itself is part of the magic and mystery of the world and of the Cosmos.

We are not just our body, but if we fully relax into our embodiment, we relax into the magic of the body, relax into the amulet or talisman that a human body can be. The human heart, mind, and body can be a magical amulet, elixir, or incantation for the world and her beings.

The body is a symbol, a magical incantation of the soul. In our true nature, however, we are magic itself, not a particular incantation.

And the magic itself is a child. It has youthful energy, viriditas, a fresh mind, moment to moment. It has a sense of playfulness, even in situations in which the ego and its body feel threatened and serious and scared, even terrified.

The body of magic, the body of the soul, just comes and goes. It lasts as long as an incantation. It evokes the great mind and memory, then fades back into them. But the magic keeps going, and the incantations keep singing out of the silence and returning back to it.

But childlike things go into the shadow, and quite tragically, human beings caught in conquest consciousness rarely become adults.

This does not mean they express the wisdom of the soul. It means quite the opposite: Because things like death, old age, and youthfulness get pushed into the shadow, then people in the dominant culture cannot fully touch the wisdom of these things.

It may seem astonishing in a culture that seems obsessed with staying young that we actually push this child dimension of the soul into the unconscious. But this is how the shadow works: We allow what we approve of, and we repress what we don’t.

We surely push aging and eldership into the shadow. We push genuine maturity into the shadow. And of course we push death into the shadow.

But Jung is saying we don’t really confront the true nature of youth either. We will happily throw tantrums and give in to impulsiveness, but that is not the nature of the child Jung found himself a servant to. Rather, those are encumbered expressions of something that frightens the ego too much for the unencumbered aspects to come to light.

Our tantrums have to do with our lack of spiritual maturity, the traumas of childhood in the dominant culture, and our general inability to enter the magic of the body, the soul, the heart, the mind, the Earth.

The shadow holds the aspects of youth that stand close to the veil, the aspects of youth that stand side by side with the aspects of old age.

The shadow holds the link to the impersonal dimension of youth, which means our essential nature that does not age and will not die.

We have pushed into the shadow precisely the youthful aspect of Sophia, of wisdom herself, wisdom itself, the youthful aspect of life, sacredness as wildness and as viriditas. And we have pushed it there with aspects of aging and death that equally befuddle us.

The youthful aspect of wisdom gets portrayed in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. There we read, in Walter Kaufmann’s translation, that

Zarathustra descended alone from the mountains, encountering no one. But when he came into the forest, all at once there stood before him an old man who had left his holy cottage to look for roots in the woods. And thus spoke the old man to Zarathustra:

“No stranger to me is this wanderer: many years ago he passed this way. Zarathustra he was called, but he has changed. At that time you carried your ashes to the mountains; would you now carry your fire into the valleys? Do you not fear to be punished as an arsonist?

“Yes, I recognize Zarathustra. His eyes are pure, and around his mouth there hides no disgust. Does he not walk like a dancer?

“Zarathustra has changed, Zarathustra has become a child, Zarathustra is an awakened one; what do you now want among the sleepers? You lived in your solitude as in the sea, and the sea carried you. Alas, would you now climb ashore? Alas, would you again drag your own body?”

Here Nietzsche has someone recognize the childlike aspect of wisdom as it appears in Zarathustra. Zarathustra then goes down the mountain to teach people. Among his teachings, he offers the allegory of the three metamorphoses of the spirit.

Zarathustra says the spirit becomes a camel, and then the camel becomes a lion, and then the lion becomes a child.

Becoming a camel involves an act of strength. The spirit, in reverence, seeks to bear the most difficult things. Zarathustra includes things like loving those who despise us and offering a hand to ghosts that frighten us. He’s talking about facing our demons and our shadow.

The camel kneels down and asks for a heavy load, and then the camel heads off to the desert.

In the loneliness of the desert, a second transformation takes place, and the camel becomes a lion.

The lion has to confront a dragon. The dragon’s name is Thou Shalt.

Here we see a typical dominant culture notion: Because the dominant culture has so much delusion and incoherence in it, as we mature we go through a stage of rebellion. If we didn’t wish to rebel against the dominant culture, we would be truly lost.

But Nietzsche seems to already question the notion of the sovereign individual here, because the lion who defies Thou Shalt by asserting I will must undergo a metamorphosis in order to realize a fuller potential.

The lion has the capacity of the Sacred No, the life-affirming No that we must say to our habitual patterns of thought, speech, and action.

In the Windhorse mandala, this marks the entrance to our spiritual life, and it involves one of the four core skills—the skills that we are as opposed to skills that we have.

The Sacred No must yet give way toa Sacred Yes. That’s what Nietzsche sees in the image of the child: A beginner’s mind, a kind of purity of heart, a playfulness, and an expression of original mind. Original mind means the mind of the origin, not the mind of novelty. The child can accomplish original thinking and original activity, because the ego-centric lion that says I will gives way to the original mind that can will its own will.

This is all rather subtle. The essential point for us comes to the resonance we find in Nietzsche, in Jung, and in other traditions when it comes to recognizing the youthful aspect of wisdom.

Our consideration of this youthful aspect of wisdom took its impulse from Jung’s consideration of the Bible. He asks other questions about the Bible as well. For instance, By what morality did the Lord justify the taking of the ass which he needed in order to ride in triumph into Jerusalem? And, How was it that, shortly afterward, he put on a display of childish bad temper and cursed the fig tree?

What kind of morality emerges from the parable of the unjust steward?

And, What, does it mean when St. Paul confesses: “The good that I intend, I don’t actually do, and the evil which I do not wish to intend, that I actually do”?

How can it be? The vast majority of human beings on this planet do not wake up in the morning thinking, “Today, I would like to degrade ecologies, and I would like to contribute at least in some small way to my own suffering and the suffering of other humans and other beings too.” And yet, these things happen every day.

We may or may not intend evil, and yet much evil happens in the world.

And Jung points out that we now have to meet the question of evil without the help of mythology. And can anyone guess what will happen?

It seems that we begin to project mythological meaning and power onto anything we can, including politicians and tech-gurus.

In other words, Donald Trump swooped into power not because of genuinely good character, not because he was wise, loving, and a graceful, beautiful human being and therefore a great leader, but because we have become so cut off from visionary LoveWisdom, so cut off from the mytho-poetic energies in our own soul, that those energies had to discharge into anything that would function as a spiritual lightning rod, even the cheapest and most degraded of alloys.

Thus, someone like Donald Trump becomes a real hero to millions, and people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk also become heroes, and people consider them visionary—a term that no wisdom tradition would ever apply to them.

Whether we voted for Trump or not, he appears as the shadow of the collective psyche. This is why people have confessed that Trump says things that they believe but never dared to say.

Trump doesn’t invite people to face their shadow and begin working with it. Rather he seems to invite people to let the shadow loose, whatever evil may come from it.

Given the clear dangers of electing such figures to positions of power, given the grave dangers of thinking of tech-gurus as saviors or visionaries in any meaningful sense, given the real suffering of humans and other beings in the world, given the ecological catastrophe and the ongoing nuclear threat, we can sense that our present situation doesn’t allow us the luxury of ignoring the psyche, including the shadow.

At the same time, we can acknowledge that Jung, as an experienced psychologist, clearly felt that we have become ill-equipped to face ourselves.

We have no choice but to become more well-equipped. LoveWisdom offers us the training we need to begin to work with our own mind, including our shadow.

Thankfully, once we have a reasonable grounding in LoveWisdom, the basic process of shadow work remains pretty simple: We incorporate it into the general cultivation of the mind, heart, body, world, and cosmos that forms the interwoven foundation of our spiritual practice.

We will look at some concrete aspects of how to discover and work with our shadow in the next contemplation.

In the meantime, if you have any stories of the shadow or the unconscious that you’d like to share, or 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.