Shadow and happiness

  • 2015

This statement by Carl Gustav Jung has been chasing me for a good part of my life, following me through different places on my life journey. And it still does ... like the Shadow.

What is the shadow? The Shadow is everything that, paraphrasing Robert Bly, "we put in the bag" and try to forget for different reasons. And the sack we are talking about is very large: they fit from repressed sexual desires for not being well seen by society, to the inability to face authority.

In essence, they are issues that we banish to "another party", apparently far from our conscious self so as not to have problems.

When we try to explore that part of ourselves, we realize that the best way to do it is by observing what we don't like about others: the mechanism of projecting our own aspects on the other is a powerful weapon to understand What do we talk about when we try to define the Shadow.

Another way to know the Shadow is through dreams. In them, the so-called " I watchman " rests, and lets other less controlling aspects appear in the light.

A beautiful metaphor of John Sandford about it explains that while we are awake the self that acts is like the sun of a summer day: it illuminates everything, but it does not reveal the stars. When the sun is not there, we realize the diversity of lights in the sky ...

Actually, the Shadow has a very bad reputation. And it has always tended to identify it with Evil. But if we analyze a little the elements of our “sack”, we will realize that the Shadow belongs to the Ego, it is part of it: that is, we are both Dr Jekyll as Mr. Hyde.

The attempts of certain religious and spiritual confessions to separate the "good" part of the human being from its "other part" have their clearest origin in the concept of " Boni privatization " of St. Augustine: evil would be the absence of good, with what good deeds can help us eradicate evil.

From there, the fragmented vision of the human personality, based on the negation of the Shadow as an intrinsic element to it, was largely divided.

We also find examples of this naive vision of reality in many elements of the New Age philosophy, where you only try to achieve the union of the human being with the Light forgetting the dark part that accompanies it inexorably.

As Jung tells us in the quotation that opens this article, the " good man " is an incomplete man. Because the Shadow itself are only aspects of our own ego that we prefer not to show in the light of consciousness. And it only has the evil that the ego itself projects on it.

We cannot only take half of life. It is given to us entirely, and we cannot pretend to evolve as human beings without being complete. The ancient alchemists knew the process of integration with the Shadow and illustrated it: it was a phase that preceded the union of the anima and the animus, that is, the fusion of the feminine and masculine parts that also coexist within us.

Working with the Shadow takes different forms: but all part of sincerity before ourselves. We cannot fully know each other if we do not tell ourselves the truth. From there begins a long road of vital integration with our aspects less pleasant, but equally necessary ... and inevitably present.

In fact, and as John Pierrakos rightly tells us in one of his books, “who intends to devote himself to the spiritual without having previously worked on his negative facets - his defenses and his egoistic resistances - may be able to fly high like Icarus but when he approaches the ardent the sun will collapse heavily in the sea of ​​life where it will end up drowning. ”

Only by speaking with our Shadow can we be truly free and complete.

Unknown author

SEEN AT: http://www.elblogalternativo.com/2010/02/27/la-sombra-y-la-felicidad/

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