Tag Archives: the shadow

Our Beastly Dimension Can Be Subtle

Darkness and evil have been a focus of mine most of my life. For the first few decades I saw it “out there” only and then began seeing and experiencing its presence in the deepest parts of my soul. This is not to say that I became “evil” as such at any time, but I began to realize that the “shadow” of Carl Jung was present with us all, including even in our most pious ambitions and behaviors. I’ve lived long enough now to see this abysmal ugliness come to the fore in my country in a most egregious form where standards of moral and spiritual propriety are routinely scoffed at, disrespect for our fellow humankind is rampant, and organized religion exists often only in a bastardized form.

A friend sent me only yesterday a link to a 19^th century evangelical Scottish pastor, George MacDonald, who was also a writer of fantasy literature. I was immediately intrigued with him, looked up his Wiki-quotes, and found the following, “A beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast, the less he knows it.” It made me think of earlier days in my life, and in tendencies I still have, and in certain dimensions of our country’s political leadership. Recognizing this “beastliness” of our nature is often addressed in spiritual traditions under the rubric of “sin.” But MacDonald recognized that the closer one has devolved into beastliness, the least likely is he to acknowledge this to himself or others even with a simple note like, “I was wrong.” The beast cannot acknowledge any fault because he is driven only by his appetites without any filtering by self-reflection. He knows only what his appetites compel him toward.

The Challenge of “Naming Our Demons”

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Early in my clinical career a client of mine was a young truck driver who was dealing with substance abuse. Shortly after the therapy began, I asked him to share about his family life as a child. As he complied and described life in a working-class Arkansas family, he recalled his mother one time flashing her boobs at him when he was about four years of age; this event shamed him greatly and he had carried it with him into adulthood. Not long after, as the work of therapy progressed, he suddenly told me he had recently had a homosexual encounter. When he shared this, he immediately burst into laughter, uproarious laughter as if a burden had been lifted by the simple disclosure of these two events by which he had been shamed. He must have intuitively sensed an, “unconditional positive regard” that was available in the clinical framework that I offered; he felt free to share these two events, and others, without the fear of being judged.

It is shame that binds us into a self-defeating life, often with tragic outcomes. Suddenly this young man found freedom from this shame bind and could only laugh that he had been tyrannized for most of his twenty-something years. There is power in saying the unsayable, in admitting that which is too painful to admit. There is power in putting subjective anguish into speech, “speaking words that give shape to our anguish” as George Eliot described it. But speaking openly and honestly about what is going on in our heart, especially if we have been raised in a culture where this is verboten. Many children learn to “shut down” even before they can verbalize, for they have certainly been very aware of the “tyranny of the shoulds” abounding in the household. The reach of this tyranny is most lethal in early childhood as it shapes attitudes, the ability to trust others and one’s own subjective experience.

Here is relevant wisdom from Lauren van der Post: “There is nothing in your life too terrible or too sad that will not be your friend when you find the right name to call it, and calling it by its own name hastening it will come upright to your side.” As Carl Jung would say, “The shadow is to be embraced, not denied”; or in the words of poet Ranier Rilke, “The heart has its beastly little treasures.”

“Breaking Bad” and our Collective Shadow

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I have recently been watching the first four seasons of Breaking Bad, finally relenting to the pressure of a good friend who insisted it was television at its finest. He was right. It is the most compelling television presentation I’ve ever seen. The story-line, the plot, the character-development, the acting, the directing, the cinematography is absolutely magnificent. I don’t watch a lot of popular television but once I started viewing this series, I could not stop and even now have embarked on the recently available season five.

BUT, this show is intensely disturbing and dark. Usually with a description like this I would refer to grisly violence and sexual perversion; and there is some violence but the real disturbing violence is psychological, emotional, and ultimately spiritual.

The story is about a benign…even lame…high school science teacher who learns he is dying of cancer and is going to leave his family nothing. He happens to be suddenly exposed to the world of methamphetamine manufacturing by his DEA brother-in-law and decides, “Hey, I can do that.” And he does. And he does it well.

From episode to episode he is lured down the dark path of drug culture though he always avoids use of the meth himself. But relentlessly he makes poor decisions which lead to other poor decisions which brings him to a point where he has gone over to the dark side…he has “broke bad”…even though he continues to have the façade of a middle class citizen who is recovering from cancer.

But Breaking Bad is not about the drug culture, nor is it a “made for tv” morality story. It is about human ugliness and the way in which good, upright people can suddenly find themselves in the middle of this “shadow side” of life through a series of unfortunate events, compounded by the willingness to forego moral principles. Early in the series I found myself asking, “Why am I watching this?” It was so disturbing, creating unrest in my heart that I usually find only with violence in movies.

As I paid attention to my reactions as I watched the series, I could not help but observe that many world cultures would not permit this kind of social analysis and criticism. The Taliban, for example, would never allow self-reflection of this sort to take place. In fact, ultra-conservative ideologies of all stripes would not allow such self-reflection and would radically extirpate the first hint of such a tendency. In fact, in all ultra-conservative extremency there is always a theme of “purity” which serves the purpose of keeping out this “shadow side” which our culture permits in shows like this and in the arts in general. (Anthropologist Mary Douglas and psychologist Julia Kristeva are two people who have addressed the problematic nature of this “purity” obsession.)

And, for all the problems that our culture does have, I feel that ultimately to own this “ugly” dimension of our experience, to articulate it through various forms of art, is to give vent to it. Otherwise, we always project it onto others, that ubiquitous “them” out there, that “barbarian horde” which is always threatening our perimeter. We fail to own up to the wisdom of Charlie Brown, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Marianne Williamson and Shadow Politics

The Shadow, per Richard Rohr

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prose/poetry/philosophy/religion