Owning Your Own Shadow Summary (7/10)

Robert Johnson starts Owning Your Shadow with Jung’s favorite story. Without effort or limit, the water of life wanted to make itself known on earth, so it appeared through an artesian well. People drank this magic water and were nourished, but eventually, they chose to escape this Edenic state. They erupted walls regulations, charged admission, and claimed ownership of the property around it. This angered the magic water, and it left the well and went somewhere else.

Because people were so distracted by their own creations, they didn’t realize they were selling nonexistent water. After the water appeared in a new place, and nourished other people, they again repeated the same pattern as the people before them, and this has been going on forever.

Many people fail to find the magic water, because they are not prepared to look for it in unusual places. One unexpected source is our shadow – all the parts of us that we consciously disown. The shadow does not cost anything but is always present. To accept and to honor our shadow is a profound spiritual task.

The persona is what we aspire to be, and how we want to be seen by others. It mediates between our true selves and our environment the same way our clothes do. The ego is our conscious self, and the shadow is the part of us that we fail to see or know.

Having a persona is essential to living among people, it gives us great powers, but it also removes us away from our “primitive” selves, our blissful states. That is what culture does for us, and throughout the world, it has imposed on man ways of living, but these ways often oppose each other.

In the West a man may hold hands with a woman on the street but not with another man; in India he may hold hands with a male friend but not with a woman. In the West one shows respect by wearing shoes in formal or religious places; in the East it a sign of disrespect to wear shoes when one is in a temple or house. In the Middle East one burps at the end of a meal to show pleasure; in the West this would be very bad manners.

Owning Your Own Shadow, Robert Johnson

Things are this way arbitrarily. In some societies, individuality is cherished while it is considered a sin in others. The clash of these opposing viewpoints becomes more dangerous as we become more connected. The shadow of one culture is troublesome for another one.

The shadow is not only the dark side, it also includes noble parts of you that you do not want to acknowledge – therefore some people engage obsessively in hero worship. There is gold in the shadow too.

The shadow is a necessary by-product of our actions, for everything we do, we produce a shadow. A hardworking person creates a shadow that wants to have fun. Our task is to find the wholeness of our personality and not be slaves to cultural ideals that force us to conform to unreasonable modes of behavior.

Thinking that you are the sole master of your house is the mistake most people make – that is, to ignore the existence of their shadow. Jung’s great insight was the ego and the shadow come from the same source, but they balance each other.

A medieval illuminated manuscript gives us this information in vivid form. Here a stylized tree of knowledge, with its golden fruit, rises up from Adam’s navel. Adam is looking a little sleepy as if he does not entirely comprehend what he has produced. Two women stand beside the tree. The Virgin Mary is on the left, clothed as a nun, picking fruit from the tree and handing it out to a long line of penitents for their salvation. Eve, naked, stands on the right, picking fruit from the same tree, handing it out to a long line of people for their damnation. Here is vivid commentary on a single tree giving out a dual product. What a strange tree! Whenever we pluck the fruit of creativity from the golden tree our other hand plucks the fruit of destruction. Our resistance to this insight is very high! We would love to have creativity without destruction, but that is not possible.

I regret the prevailing attitude at present that goodness or sainthood consists of living as much as possible on the right hand, the good side, of the seesaw. Sainthood has been caricatured as an image of the all-right person, the person who has transferred everything to the perfect side of his personality. Such a condition would be completely unstable and would flip immediately. The balance would be disrupted and life would be impossible.

Owning Your Own Shadow, Robert Johnson

It is as if there is a law – one that most people ignore. Reality is balanced, as if on a seesaw. Any extreme behavior on one side will result in fanatical opposition (in the seesaw to tip upwards). The person who is a workaholic will manifest a form of extreme play that could be very dangerous, for example. The person who is extremely frivolous with their time, may then become fanatical and militant.

Many a woman is burdened by paying out the dark side of a creative man; many a man is drained by carrying the dark side of a woman that is the byproduct of her creativity. Worst of all, children often have to carry the dark side of creative parents. It is proverbial that the minister’s child will be difficult and the wealthy man’s child is in danger of leading a meaningless life.

When you ignore your own darkness, you store up, or accumulate the darkness – this can be expressed as a dark mood, psychological illness, or unconsciously inspired accidents. Society worships the light and refuses the dark, and the residue manifests as war, economic chaos, and intolerance.

George Bernard Shaw said that the only alternative to torture is art. This means we will engage in our creativity (in the ceremonial or symbolic world) or have to face its alternative, brutality.

Owning Your Own Shadow, Robert Johnson

The Shadow in Projection

Unless we consciously work on finding our shadow, we will almost always project it onto others. The news offers an outlet for us to feed our shadow nature outwardly – by making us think that the “evil” is in this country or in that dictator, when what we should be doing is finding it within ourselves and accepting it, but projection is much easier than assimilation.

Each year, the Aztecs chose a youth and a maiden to carry the shadow and then ritually sacrificed them. The term bogey man has an interesting origin: in old India each community chose a man to be the “bogey.” He was to be slaughtered at the end of the year and to take the evil deeds of the community with him. The people were so grateful for this service that until his death the bogey was not required to do any work and could have anything he wanted. He was treated as a representative of the next world. Since he had the power of the collective shadow in him he was supremely powerful and feared. From India through the West we still have the threat ’The bogey man will get you if you are not good!” This is how we frighten a child into goodness with the dark side of life.

Parents do the worst damage when they lay their shadow on their children, and it is so common that most people must work very hard to throw off their parents’ shadow before they can become adults.

If a parent lays his shadow on a young child, that splits the personality of the child and sets the ego-shadow warfare into motion. When that child grows up, he will have a large shadow to cope with (more than just the cultural shadow that all of us carry), and he will also have a tendency to put that shadow upon his own children.

Owning Your Own Shadow, Robert Johnson

Is it possible to refuse a shadow projection from someone? Yes, but only if you are well-identified with your shadow. Usually, receiving a shadow projection incites warfare between your own shadow and theirs – your shadow is dormant, just waiting for someone to poke it before it manifests itself.

The best thing you can do is to ignore shadow projection when it happens.

The shadow also contains a good deal of energy, and it is the cornerstone of our vitality. A very cultured individual with an equally strong shadow has a great deal of personal power. William Blake spoke about the need to reconcile these two parts of the self. He said we should go to heaven for form and to hell for energy—and marry the two. When we can face our inner heaven and our inner hell, this is the highest form of creativity.

If we can love our inner enemy, then we can love and redeem the outer one.

The best example of the meeting between ego and shadow is in Goethe’s Faust.

It is about a pale, old professor who is on the edge of suicide because of the great distance created between his ego and his shadow. Mephistopheles, Faust’s equally impossible shadow appears as the devil. There is a great explosion of energy when the two meet, but they persevere, and have a long, vivid journey – it is the best example of the redemption of ego and shadow. Faust ceases to be lifeless and become passionate and red-blooded, while Mephistopheles is saved from amorality and discovers a capacity for love. Love is only word that is adequate to describe the synthesis between ego and shadow. Faust shows how you can redeem the ego but only when you redeem that shadow that parallels it. Neither ego nor shadow can be redeemed if its twin is not transformed.

The Gold in the Shadow

We also reject the hero within us.  

A fourteen-year-old boy hero-worships a sixteen year old and asks him to carry what the fourteen year old is not yet capable of doing; in a few months he has assimilated that capacity and is living what he relegated to shadow only shortly before. Probably an eighteen year old then is his hero that he soon catches up with. Development generally takes this means of introducing the next stage of its progress. Today’s hero is tomorrow’s character.

There are two shadows. The first is the dark side of the ego, which is unacknowledged unless forced by life’s difficulties. The second is what is repressed in us, but what is also connected to the self.

In a showdown God (Self] favors the shadow over the ego, for the shadow, with all of its dangerousness, is closer to the center and more genuine.

Owning Your Own Shadow, Robert Johnson

Jung warned us that getting the dark side of our shadow out is easier than getting the good side out. People often refuse to see the goodness in them, if you see gold in someone, they will resist it with all their strength. That is why hero worship so common, it is easier to admire from far away that to become a lesser version of your ideal.

Individuation

Jung said that being in a situation when there is no way out, without a solution, is the classical beginning of the process of individuation. The unconscious needs this hopeless conflict to put the ego consciousness against the wall so that man realized that he is wrong, that whatever he decides is wrong. This knocks out the ego’s superiority, which always behaves from the illusion that it is responsible for its decisions. To do nothing is also wrong, for nothing happens. But if he is ethical enough to suffer to the core of his personality, then usually, the Self manifest.

In religious language you could say that the situation without issue is meant to force the man to rely on an act of God. In psychological language the situation without issue, which the anima arranges with great skill in a man’s life, is meant to drive him into a condition in which he is capable of experiencing the Self. When thinking of the anima as the soul guide, we are apt to think of Beatrice leading Dante up to Paradise, but we should not forget that he experienced that only after he had gone through Hell. Normally, the anima does not take a man by the hand and lead him right up to Paradise; she puts him first into a hot cauldron where he is nicely roasted for a while.*

During a hard time in his life, Jung drew a mandala every morning to keep his sense of balance and proportion. Mandalas are representations of harmony and wholeness, seek it and by doing so, you will find your Self, and you will be integrated.