(The following is a conversation between Gwynne Mayer and Robert Heyward, moderator of the junglife@yahoogroups.com list. We hope to bring you a more in depth approach to the exploration of the inner world of self. The following is on the discussion the applications of shadow work. This is written in May of 2003 but may have excerpts of writings from earlier times.)
Quoted below are some responses you had to a writer, we will call H., in 1999 from the jung-l list.
Dear H. you ask?
And I project my shadow onto other people, or the world in general,because it is difficult for me to see and accept the shadow portion ofmyself? For instance, if I see the world as being full of ill feelingstoward me, then I want to look and see if in fact *I* am full of illfeelings toward me? My shadow side has begun to become apparent to me andI can't bear to look or allow myself to experience conflicting feelings inmyself about myself?
RGH: In a personal sense, yes. The Shadow is the first face of the unconscious, beneath which lies all that is unconscious - ie, that to which we are not adapted within our ego consciousness right down to the core levels of collective unconscious being.
GM: Do you believe that the first encounter with the personal unconscious is the shadow?
RGH: It has to be, in the sense that *everything* in the unconscious is "shadow" at this point. But see below:
GM: And could that be bypassed to go further into the unconscious without dealing with the shadow?
RGH: In this sense I assume you mean *not* dealing with the personal shadow. Which, in fact, is a most common problem - that men are willing to deal with the gods first and themselves second. And, as you can see from history - and todays news - it is how we justify our inhumanity, which merely shows the sick irony: that one cannot deal with the gods in this way - for they will ever enact a price, a vengeance, to be paid for such assumption. In personal life, it is a matter of just how one approaches the gods. If you approach them as an unclean person, then they will entangle you in your own limitations; justice is enacted upon the projector. For example, every man might tell a tale of how the anima ensnared him and then enacted justice via his own limited understanding after he realized that partnership with the "woman of his dreams" was not going to be the bliss he imagined.
GM: Personally, I believe, bypassing the work on the shadow would border on craziness, due to the illusion of the archetypal nature becoming one's reality, instead of relegating it to the more enormous content of the unconscious. How would you see that and it's affect on the individual?
RGH: Ah.. well. There are lots of myths that discuss this very thing and illustrate the effects better than I can. But they all relate back to the "sorcerers apprentice" in some way. In our day and age we have the obvious effects that drugs like LSD can have upon the individual who takes them for "kicks". They get kicked all right. But all drugs are doorways to the nether regions - even heroin. Few seem to realize that the body is part of the unconscious and that it has its gods. We just do not think mythologically enough these days. Our old friend Paracelsus would have recognized the danger to the soul immediately. The most common case of the accessing of the deeper layers of the unconscious without thought to one's own purity is seen these days in the new age movement - but it has ever been the same, the sudden and complete involvement with "otherness" the assumption of "psychic sensitivity" etc, etc. In some women this just an animus problem, ie, married women who affect some kind of "mediumship" etc are often in the throes of a bad marriage, whether they are conscious of this fact or not. Most likely they will be found to remarry or find a "partner" who "grounds them" or "supports their work" etc. In truth they are merely enacting a relationship in which they are in control of the animus/anima partnership and thus in control of the "maleness" of their husband/partner, which now allows them to hide from the need to confront the true nature of their animus fears and insecurities. Sooner or later this all comes crashing down as the gods tire of the pawns they utilize for their work. :-) But then we have the "informed" side of this business. The person who - although unconscious of the need to be "perfect before the gods" recognizes that the unconscious is a place of great power and wonder and deliberately decides to storm the gates of - well, is it heaven..or hell? - EIther way, they enact the rituals and are prepared for combat. History speaks to us of many such people - Austin Osmond Spare for instance, and from an earlier time one thinks of that sixteenth century self styled Magus upon whom Goethe styled his Faust. (What was his name?) Anyway, the result is ...well it can be anything. But it is a good way to find out that one does indeed need to deal carefully with ones own personal shadow. The Gods are harsh teachers. :-)
RGH: Although we have to be very careful in using the notion of blanket projection of the personal (ego) shadow upon others. This is simply not always the case. A considerable variation in type and quantity of personal projection occurs, depending upon both environmental and emotional factors -ie, the factors of nature and nurture are considerably more important in the equation than the simple concept "unconsciousness = projection."Regarding personal guilt and collective guilt you say:
RGH: Usually it is only those who project their own guilt, who would see those misdemeanors that have become public knowledge punished. In this way we sidestep and stand outside our own guilt within the collective. A simple affair - any child could repeat story after story of such behavior.
GM: So to break free of the collective, and to stand outside the collective, would that mean that one has to deal in a special way with the shadow of guilt?
RGH: Yes - one has to lay it at the feet of ones own personal God. This is the way of the warrior. In recognizing his imperfections before the One who demands his impeccability he recognizes that no other blame can be cast upon others. This however does not mean that he will not recognize the need for punishment of another. Here you enter the dangerous waters of the soul and its connections to the collective safety of all souls - which is of course is a mythical enactment of the laws of nature - in the sense that the "outsider" who sees himself as beholden only to his personal God might deem it worthy to do something which society might not be capable of. Or he might be led to suffer for all men, to enact the ritual of abandonment so that he can forgive guilt in all men: the sad savior who dies alone for the sake of his own God's appeasement.
H. Questions RGH: >But something *does* need to be done with criminals, the fact of crime is not a figment of my imagination, so how can I be both aware of my inner conflicts, my tendency to project them outward, and also keep a responsible attitude toward what is actually occurring in the world which is *not* a projection of an inner conflict?
RGH: In this regard you have the choice of the individual. Until it becomes your decision to decide what is to be done with criminals then I would suggest you forget about it. Unless you decide it is your life's work to change the system, then allow the collective to make its judgments, as it will. Your choice as an individual remains clear and present - to be or not to be a "criminal" in the sense you perceive such behavior. It is so easy to be a part of the mob. Within the crowd, "justice" is whatever creates the best for the most. It is a very different story when one plays out the "justice" game as an individual. For the mob, justice is a survival regulated mechanism, its judgments the judgments of the unconscious collective. When an individual is called upon to enact justice, and then he finds no safe haven, he finds - just as the collective does in its need to sanctify its justice - that such judgments must come from the most sacred fountain of inner knowing. From God. And it is at such moments that the individual finds the ultimate dilemma resides within himself, just as he projects it upon his God - the balance of justice and mercy. What we tend to forget is the individual has no right to complain about collective justice. We must choose between life or death, in every moment, in every action, in every word.
GM: Strong statements are made in this paragraph, regarding justice. How do we make our peace with our concept of power/God within the collective? It seems one must wrestle with this everyday and that, in and of itself is a life/death struggle. Am I even close to understanding what you are saying here?
RGH: Nature is conservative of her victories and careless with her defeats. And this law is known to us in our bones - thus we preserve our own before anything else. So until such time as we become vengeance itself we cannot - must not assume to be of greater justice than the collective wisdom which is regulated by the need for the survival of the group. As individuals we might wring our hands in dismay or curse in disgust at the atrocious justice of the day, and indeed in our personal lives we MUST enact the justice we find within our own conscience, but such enactment must and ought to be limited by the justice of the collective unless and until such time as we can live outside its proscriptions. Only the truly individuating person understands just what a struggle this is - and it is a razor's edge, a thin line between the twin enactments of God's justice and his mercy, the thin line that leads us onward in hope and keeps us from falling either way into the arms of the archetype of survival.
H: Or do you think that acceptance of the shadow allows room for compassion to enter, and acceptance of the shadow in oneself has a healing effect which sort of takes care of this issue of "how to deal with what is *not* a projection?"
RGH: At the individual level, yes. "There but for the grace of God, go I" is a hard saying for some to accept, particularly when young. But you come to see it, to understand it. It helps, but it is not everything. In other words, regardless of our compassion, our reliance upon the golden rule when dealing with others, particularly those who have offended us, we also tend to ask that they too make a leap of consciousness, that they too will not remain merely the beneficiaries of our understanding. This is the human response - to which Jesus replied "until seventy times seven". But, as with all moral stories, such ideals ignore the human limitation, the built in condition of balance we were born with as human animals.
GM: So the human limitation causes us to still do battle with that element of our shadow which finds no peace, no forgiveness? When do we give up EXPECTING anything of someone who holds our shadow? Don't you believe there is some arrogance in that expectation?
RGH: We give up "expecting" (A) when we recognize that we are not projecting personally but collectively. When we realize that the "other" is truly "not of the herd" and carries a negative value into society. This is the point where we no longer expect - but demand. Or (B) when we recognize that there is no value in our continued interaction with this person because we recognize that without mutual acceptance of shadow projections we place ourselves in danger, ie , we become the carriers of negative instinct and fall into the archetype of the martyr, the dying savior, etc. In other words we allow ourselves to carry the contagion of another's unconscious. Mind you we might do this as a step towards mutual awareness, but if continued we simply become victims of our own nature, who in enacting gods mercy find the sword of his justice plunged through our heart. H: How does a person separate the real from the projected?
RGH: The short answer is probably: you can't, because everything is a projection. But I know what you mean, regarding the normal person's behavior towards the world and how bound up it might be with ego projections, both positive and negative. I'll have a think about this as a technical point and try to give you an answer, later.
GM: If the metaphysical idea is that we are the only ONE here, then all else is projection. Given that theory, when do we understand that we are moving beyond ego in the exploration of projection and shadow?
RGH: When the Gods begin to become visible...or the demons. When we begin to become aware of their movements and manipulations.
GM: I see ego as a boundary system between consciousness and unconsciousness, to put it quite simplistically, however I believe there is a leap in here that one must make before getting the full impact of the work to be done on the owning of one's universe. Even more so in realizing that one created it for that person. Or is this happenstance?
RGH: I'll have to work on this one. I have no system of belief when it comes to life or the journey of the "soul". Beliefs are a luxury the seeker cannot afford. I think we confuse ourselves and all too easily simplify our ways of looking at things when we make such demarcations as you made in your first sentence. There are no boundaries between "conscious" and "unconscious". The "unconscious" is not a "thing" or a "place" as much as we like to project it this way in our conceptual space. Everything we call unconscious dynamics or images or archetypes are an expression of that within which we live and move - the very processes of life itself. Our psychic myths provide an inbuilt set of rules of engagement, bonuses, forfeits and the like. But they are indifferent to conscious activity in a certain sense - ie, they cannot enact above a certain level of awareness. This was the whole point of Jung's "Answer to Job", ie, that consciousness is a product which is ever greater than that which lies beneath it - just sufficiently so for it to be able to return again and again to the fray - to perambulate the "Self" as he put it, and to re-emerge even stronger. Thus any conscious interaction with the unconscious breaks the laws of the instinctive myths, forces the rules of the game ever so slightly toward its favor, and pays the price of its assumption. But what it loses in definition it gains in wisdom - in breadth - and this is the true expansion of consciousness, that it gathers ever so slightly a greater portion of heaven and hell unto itself. And even this is not the whole business - by a long shot, :-)
Quoted below are some responses you had to a writer, we will call H., in 1999 from the jung-l list.
Dear H. you ask?
And I project my shadow onto other people, or the world in general,because it is difficult for me to see and accept the shadow portion ofmyself? For instance, if I see the world as being full of ill feelingstoward me, then I want to look and see if in fact *I* am full of illfeelings toward me? My shadow side has begun to become apparent to me andI can't bear to look or allow myself to experience conflicting feelings inmyself about myself?
RGH: In a personal sense, yes. The Shadow is the first face of the unconscious, beneath which lies all that is unconscious - ie, that to which we are not adapted within our ego consciousness right down to the core levels of collective unconscious being.
GM: Do you believe that the first encounter with the personal unconscious is the shadow?
RGH: It has to be, in the sense that *everything* in the unconscious is "shadow" at this point. But see below:
GM: And could that be bypassed to go further into the unconscious without dealing with the shadow?
RGH: In this sense I assume you mean *not* dealing with the personal shadow. Which, in fact, is a most common problem - that men are willing to deal with the gods first and themselves second. And, as you can see from history - and todays news - it is how we justify our inhumanity, which merely shows the sick irony: that one cannot deal with the gods in this way - for they will ever enact a price, a vengeance, to be paid for such assumption. In personal life, it is a matter of just how one approaches the gods. If you approach them as an unclean person, then they will entangle you in your own limitations; justice is enacted upon the projector. For example, every man might tell a tale of how the anima ensnared him and then enacted justice via his own limited understanding after he realized that partnership with the "woman of his dreams" was not going to be the bliss he imagined.
GM: Personally, I believe, bypassing the work on the shadow would border on craziness, due to the illusion of the archetypal nature becoming one's reality, instead of relegating it to the more enormous content of the unconscious. How would you see that and it's affect on the individual?
RGH: Ah.. well. There are lots of myths that discuss this very thing and illustrate the effects better than I can. But they all relate back to the "sorcerers apprentice" in some way. In our day and age we have the obvious effects that drugs like LSD can have upon the individual who takes them for "kicks". They get kicked all right. But all drugs are doorways to the nether regions - even heroin. Few seem to realize that the body is part of the unconscious and that it has its gods. We just do not think mythologically enough these days. Our old friend Paracelsus would have recognized the danger to the soul immediately. The most common case of the accessing of the deeper layers of the unconscious without thought to one's own purity is seen these days in the new age movement - but it has ever been the same, the sudden and complete involvement with "otherness" the assumption of "psychic sensitivity" etc, etc. In some women this just an animus problem, ie, married women who affect some kind of "mediumship" etc are often in the throes of a bad marriage, whether they are conscious of this fact or not. Most likely they will be found to remarry or find a "partner" who "grounds them" or "supports their work" etc. In truth they are merely enacting a relationship in which they are in control of the animus/anima partnership and thus in control of the "maleness" of their husband/partner, which now allows them to hide from the need to confront the true nature of their animus fears and insecurities. Sooner or later this all comes crashing down as the gods tire of the pawns they utilize for their work. :-) But then we have the "informed" side of this business. The person who - although unconscious of the need to be "perfect before the gods" recognizes that the unconscious is a place of great power and wonder and deliberately decides to storm the gates of - well, is it heaven..or hell? - EIther way, they enact the rituals and are prepared for combat. History speaks to us of many such people - Austin Osmond Spare for instance, and from an earlier time one thinks of that sixteenth century self styled Magus upon whom Goethe styled his Faust. (What was his name?) Anyway, the result is ...well it can be anything. But it is a good way to find out that one does indeed need to deal carefully with ones own personal shadow. The Gods are harsh teachers. :-)
RGH: Although we have to be very careful in using the notion of blanket projection of the personal (ego) shadow upon others. This is simply not always the case. A considerable variation in type and quantity of personal projection occurs, depending upon both environmental and emotional factors -ie, the factors of nature and nurture are considerably more important in the equation than the simple concept "unconsciousness = projection."Regarding personal guilt and collective guilt you say:
RGH: Usually it is only those who project their own guilt, who would see those misdemeanors that have become public knowledge punished. In this way we sidestep and stand outside our own guilt within the collective. A simple affair - any child could repeat story after story of such behavior.
GM: So to break free of the collective, and to stand outside the collective, would that mean that one has to deal in a special way with the shadow of guilt?
RGH: Yes - one has to lay it at the feet of ones own personal God. This is the way of the warrior. In recognizing his imperfections before the One who demands his impeccability he recognizes that no other blame can be cast upon others. This however does not mean that he will not recognize the need for punishment of another. Here you enter the dangerous waters of the soul and its connections to the collective safety of all souls - which is of course is a mythical enactment of the laws of nature - in the sense that the "outsider" who sees himself as beholden only to his personal God might deem it worthy to do something which society might not be capable of. Or he might be led to suffer for all men, to enact the ritual of abandonment so that he can forgive guilt in all men: the sad savior who dies alone for the sake of his own God's appeasement.
H. Questions RGH: >But something *does* need to be done with criminals, the fact of crime is not a figment of my imagination, so how can I be both aware of my inner conflicts, my tendency to project them outward, and also keep a responsible attitude toward what is actually occurring in the world which is *not* a projection of an inner conflict?
RGH: In this regard you have the choice of the individual. Until it becomes your decision to decide what is to be done with criminals then I would suggest you forget about it. Unless you decide it is your life's work to change the system, then allow the collective to make its judgments, as it will. Your choice as an individual remains clear and present - to be or not to be a "criminal" in the sense you perceive such behavior. It is so easy to be a part of the mob. Within the crowd, "justice" is whatever creates the best for the most. It is a very different story when one plays out the "justice" game as an individual. For the mob, justice is a survival regulated mechanism, its judgments the judgments of the unconscious collective. When an individual is called upon to enact justice, and then he finds no safe haven, he finds - just as the collective does in its need to sanctify its justice - that such judgments must come from the most sacred fountain of inner knowing. From God. And it is at such moments that the individual finds the ultimate dilemma resides within himself, just as he projects it upon his God - the balance of justice and mercy. What we tend to forget is the individual has no right to complain about collective justice. We must choose between life or death, in every moment, in every action, in every word.
GM: Strong statements are made in this paragraph, regarding justice. How do we make our peace with our concept of power/God within the collective? It seems one must wrestle with this everyday and that, in and of itself is a life/death struggle. Am I even close to understanding what you are saying here?
RGH: Nature is conservative of her victories and careless with her defeats. And this law is known to us in our bones - thus we preserve our own before anything else. So until such time as we become vengeance itself we cannot - must not assume to be of greater justice than the collective wisdom which is regulated by the need for the survival of the group. As individuals we might wring our hands in dismay or curse in disgust at the atrocious justice of the day, and indeed in our personal lives we MUST enact the justice we find within our own conscience, but such enactment must and ought to be limited by the justice of the collective unless and until such time as we can live outside its proscriptions. Only the truly individuating person understands just what a struggle this is - and it is a razor's edge, a thin line between the twin enactments of God's justice and his mercy, the thin line that leads us onward in hope and keeps us from falling either way into the arms of the archetype of survival.
H: Or do you think that acceptance of the shadow allows room for compassion to enter, and acceptance of the shadow in oneself has a healing effect which sort of takes care of this issue of "how to deal with what is *not* a projection?"
RGH: At the individual level, yes. "There but for the grace of God, go I" is a hard saying for some to accept, particularly when young. But you come to see it, to understand it. It helps, but it is not everything. In other words, regardless of our compassion, our reliance upon the golden rule when dealing with others, particularly those who have offended us, we also tend to ask that they too make a leap of consciousness, that they too will not remain merely the beneficiaries of our understanding. This is the human response - to which Jesus replied "until seventy times seven". But, as with all moral stories, such ideals ignore the human limitation, the built in condition of balance we were born with as human animals.
GM: So the human limitation causes us to still do battle with that element of our shadow which finds no peace, no forgiveness? When do we give up EXPECTING anything of someone who holds our shadow? Don't you believe there is some arrogance in that expectation?
RGH: We give up "expecting" (A) when we recognize that we are not projecting personally but collectively. When we realize that the "other" is truly "not of the herd" and carries a negative value into society. This is the point where we no longer expect - but demand. Or (B) when we recognize that there is no value in our continued interaction with this person because we recognize that without mutual acceptance of shadow projections we place ourselves in danger, ie , we become the carriers of negative instinct and fall into the archetype of the martyr, the dying savior, etc. In other words we allow ourselves to carry the contagion of another's unconscious. Mind you we might do this as a step towards mutual awareness, but if continued we simply become victims of our own nature, who in enacting gods mercy find the sword of his justice plunged through our heart. H: How does a person separate the real from the projected?
RGH: The short answer is probably: you can't, because everything is a projection. But I know what you mean, regarding the normal person's behavior towards the world and how bound up it might be with ego projections, both positive and negative. I'll have a think about this as a technical point and try to give you an answer, later.
GM: If the metaphysical idea is that we are the only ONE here, then all else is projection. Given that theory, when do we understand that we are moving beyond ego in the exploration of projection and shadow?
RGH: When the Gods begin to become visible...or the demons. When we begin to become aware of their movements and manipulations.
GM: I see ego as a boundary system between consciousness and unconsciousness, to put it quite simplistically, however I believe there is a leap in here that one must make before getting the full impact of the work to be done on the owning of one's universe. Even more so in realizing that one created it for that person. Or is this happenstance?
RGH: I'll have to work on this one. I have no system of belief when it comes to life or the journey of the "soul". Beliefs are a luxury the seeker cannot afford. I think we confuse ourselves and all too easily simplify our ways of looking at things when we make such demarcations as you made in your first sentence. There are no boundaries between "conscious" and "unconscious". The "unconscious" is not a "thing" or a "place" as much as we like to project it this way in our conceptual space. Everything we call unconscious dynamics or images or archetypes are an expression of that within which we live and move - the very processes of life itself. Our psychic myths provide an inbuilt set of rules of engagement, bonuses, forfeits and the like. But they are indifferent to conscious activity in a certain sense - ie, they cannot enact above a certain level of awareness. This was the whole point of Jung's "Answer to Job", ie, that consciousness is a product which is ever greater than that which lies beneath it - just sufficiently so for it to be able to return again and again to the fray - to perambulate the "Self" as he put it, and to re-emerge even stronger. Thus any conscious interaction with the unconscious breaks the laws of the instinctive myths, forces the rules of the game ever so slightly toward its favor, and pays the price of its assumption. But what it loses in definition it gains in wisdom - in breadth - and this is the true expansion of consciousness, that it gathers ever so slightly a greater portion of heaven and hell unto itself. And even this is not the whole business - by a long shot, :-)
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