The Shadow: Unlocking Our Hidden Self

Lurking beneath our day to day waking self is The Shadow. Jung referred to this as the unconscious elements of the mind. My personal teacher Father Max always disliked the term unconscious because he felt that the mind could not be unconscious, he preferred the new thought term of subjective to refer to the subconscious mind. Without getting too bound in semantics lets suffice it to say it is the elements of our psyche which lies hidden beneath the surface. It is important to note that Jung found that the shadow contains both negative and positive aspects hidden within it.

For years people have been developing a lot of techniques to uncover the shadow. Jung taught that by assimilating the unconscious shadow into the conscious self brings a wider breadth to that consciousness. The process is continuous and when worked with throughout a lifetime progresses with greater and greater integration taking place between the waking consciousness and shadow self.

Jung talked about two types of shadows, there is the individual shadow of things we repressed and can’t accept; and then there is the collective unconscious which is a universal, thus non-individuated aspect of the shadow.

Connie Zweig in a 1998 interview with Scott London advised that Jung instructed to work with the Shadow by “holding the tension of the opposites as a basis for working with the shadow.”  This conjures up the talk of Robert Anton Wilson with his constant reference to Reality Tunnels and all of the mindbending exercises he deploys to get his readers out of their fixed reality tunnels and begin to see the wider, more expansive way of relating to the world, and other people. Non-dualism is a way of seeing that in my view can assist in this process of awakening to a world that includes our disowned self.

This brings us to the work of Ken Wilber who has formulated a method of uncovering the Shadow by splitting our relation to an object, which can be a person, emotion, place, or situation, into 3 aspects. The first area is to view the object as something you view from afar. You begin to describe the object in terms of what it is on its own. The 2^nd phase is to begin directly relating to the object by beginning a dialogue, and asking question, then allowing the object to answer back. The third aspect is to become the actual thing. You embody what it is speaking from the point of view of the object. Lastly after the 3 aspects have been encountered there is an additional stage where the practitioner accepts all 3 aspects of the object, facing it, talking to it, and finally becoming it, and lastly accepting all 3 aspects.

Wilber teaches that by re-identifying with our splits we can then redirect our energy to work on our move towards wholeness and optimizing our abilities because we are no longer using so much of energy protecting ourselves from the parts of ourselves that we up until then have been unable to accept.

I personally have been working with this process in the form of a 21 minute writing exercise where all three aspects are handled separately for one full page in 7 minutes. I have been using this technique primarily by identifying with famous teachers that I have a great deal of respect for such as Chogyam Trungpa, Napoleon Hill and Ernest Holmes. In my experience it is amazing to watch these historical teachers come alive and begin to speak to me directly. I am getting so much from this direct dialogue I can’t even begin to tell you, and coupled with my free written daily morning pages I feel so strongly that these practices are doing much to enrich my life and integrate my whole person.  All this work has even propelled me to wish to start sharing what I have learned in the form of these blog posts.

Let me know what you think about these concepts, your own personal experiences in working with your shadow, and how you feel about the manner in which I am presenting this material?

Thanks,

David