“You will not find enlightenment by imagining figures of light, but by becoming aware of the darkness.”
C.G. Jung
Carl Gustav Jung would certainly not have been a big fan of today’s esoteric and spiritual scene.
It has become a colorful, loud wellness fair!
Almost everywhere, there are only angels, light, hugs and everyone advertises how to become more spiritual and more successful.
At this point I should mention that I have been working in this wellness fair for many years. I have published over 80 pleasantly relaxing guided imageries in my publishing house start2dream.
In this environment, there is also a lot to learn, especially for people who are permanently stressed, no question. And I also think that there are still far too few angels, lights and hugs in our lives. ?
But where there is light, there is also shadow, so they say. And this shadow is an integral part of our personality, says Carl Jung.
How is the inner shadow created?
When we are born, we are almost perfect. Only a few motor and mental skills are actually missing. Consciousness also needs a bit of training to get used to the physicality and limitation of this world.
But we are already perfect in our values, in our feelings, in our being.
And then society comes and changes us.
At the latest when we have grown up, we have mostly got to know all the rules of modern living together and know exactly which emotions can be lived and which are rather undesirable.
Our personality is therefore divided into two halves, namely a desired part and an undesirable part. Outside of us, we place what is positively rated in society in the foreground … For example in the form of our Facebook profile photo.
And everything else of what we are (and what we would probably never share on Facebook) moves into our inner shadow.
It is called shadow because we normally cannot perceive it clearly.
In our shadow, we find all the “ugly” emotions that are not lived out. However, ugly is of course a purely subjective valuation based on our social background.
You don’t always have to live out every emotion. This is exactly what defines a more developed society, otherwise we would probably still kill or hurt each other when the emotions boil up.
Well, we are still hurting each other, a lot of things are going on unconsciously, but often even on purpose. On Facebook you can see this from the number of offensive or hateful comments. So there would still be some development potential for humanity.
It is interesting that Facebook is censoring against hate speech. This is symptom control. And who cares about the causes?
We find them in our shadow. However, we have to look very closely and be very, very, very honest with ourselves.
But our shadow can also contain golden parts. The golden shadow is where we are already true gods but for some reason do not admit it to ourselves.
“Our deepest fear is not to be insufficient. Our deepest fear is that we are exceedingly powerful. It is our light, not our darkness, that we fear most.”
Marianne Williamson
If we bring all of our hidden talents, emotions and energies from our shadows into the light of our day-to-day consciousness, then we can become true masters of life.
Our heroes and role models form further parts in our shadow.
As long as we idolize someone else for certain qualities, we have not lived and experienced these areas sufficiently in our own lives.
Also here, it is worthwhile to look with care and learn from it. We can then gradually move closer to our heroes and role models – until we look for new heroes who have already developed further …
All your actions, thoughts and feelings are subject to polarity
This world is based on polarity.
Without cold there can be no hot. No joy without grief. No man without a woman. No light without darkness.
Whether you like it or not, each of your surely well-intentioned decisions in this world also has an effect that you might not have wanted.
Each of your actions (and this includes your thoughts and emotions) is an intervention in the system.
That does not need to frighten us. But we have to understand that this system, our spiritual and material creation, will always balance itself out after each of our actions due to the laws of polarity.
Do we have to kill to live?
Each of our conscious or unconscious actions always triggers one or more shadow actions.
Even if we are convinced vegetarians, when we pull an organic head of lettuce out of the earth, we kill thousands of tiny organisms that previously lived in a harmonious symbiosis with the lettuce.
Unless, of course, you eat lettuce from artificial and sterile mass keeping, but this has never seen damp earth and sunshine and is accordingly equipped with significantly less nutrients and energetic healing effects.
So, the difference between a vegetarian and a meat eater is which creatures you are willing to kill.
And of course, it’s also about what you want to let into your body and what you don’t.
The higher society develops, the bigger its shadow?
We as humanity have by no means developed the very highest forms and norms of society and consciousness that would theoretically be possible in this universe …
After all, in many countries you can move around the world reasonably safely without being robbed by a thief at every second corner.
But that’s evolution too: we’re still being robbed. The thieves’ guilds of the cities at that time have now become multinational corporations, from which we even buy their stuff voluntarily. ?
The further we want to develop culturally, socially and spiritually, the more we have to watch out for our shadow, which always develops in parallel.
There is an externally recognizable shadow, which originates from our direct actions, but which is also largely formed by the collective unconscious of the world. We see this shadow, for example, in the catastrophic inequality of our world, where 1% have as much as 99%.
We can see the size of our shadow from the number and overall effectiveness of our global weapon systems, as a symbol of our pent-up emotions. At the moment we could probably all destroy each other many times.
We also see our shadow when we look in the daily newspapers or television magazines and notice the imbalance between positive, constructive content and murder, violence and other negative topics.
Yes, the mass media controls public opinion. But of course, they also orient themselves on our buying behavior. The heading “Everything is good!” brings little success, because we are used to using our media as a reflection of our own shadow.
The shadow may also appear in the Sunday crime thriller and many other films and series. But only as a projection, more on that later.
Does the world need evil for a harmonious balance?
An extremely unbalanced collective shadow of the world, which we do not bring into balance in time, develops a self-stabilizing momentum. In the worst case, this can lead to war or a global economic crisis.
In my opinion, the collective shadow of the world is the deeper, spiritual reason for all wars of mankind.
The many outer reasons why there is a world crisis are then of secondary importance. It happens, because it has to happen, because a polaritarian world always has to find a balance in order to remain.
If mankind wants to ascend to higher states of consciousness and we want to see this mirrored in our outer world (for example: no wars, no violence, no hunger and a life in harmony with Mother Earth), then we now have to take good care of our collective world shadow.
The good thing is: we all form the collective world shadow.
“You have to be the change you want to see in the world.”
Mahatma Gandhi
If we take care of our personal shadow parts, if we first recognize them, then accept them and then either integrate them into our being or dissolve them, then we are also changing the whole world to a certain extent, namely the collective shadow of the world.
Our personal shadow is formed by our own actions, thoughts and feelings.
Projections don’t help
As I mentioned briefly above, violent films or news on TV are not very helpful in balancing one’s own shadow. Because when watching television, we mainly focus on the shadows outside in the world. It distracts us from our own inner shadow.
Many people unconsciously project their shadows onto other people, for example onto their boss, the Chancellor, Donald Trump, the stubborn neighbor or even their own life partner. Parents sometimes project their shadows onto their children and vice versa.
When projecting, for example, we see an error in another person from our perspective and condemn the person for it.
It is a typical shadow projection, for example, when we call other people racists but are not yet free from prejudice.
Recognizing this part of our personality that is split off from consciousness is really not that easy.
Life is the best teacher. As long as we do not work specifically on our inner shadow, daily life shows us new situations time and again to hold our shadow in front of our eyes.
This happens until we really open our eyes and clearly recognize our shadow as what it is: a part of us.
Once recognized, we can transform the inner shadow part, possibly even use it as a resource.
Sometimes, we just have to embrace the shadow as it is. Or, we can use it as a spark of inspiration to herald an important change in our lives.
When we integrate our shadow parts, we automatically find our inner center.
We will be whole again or: holy.
The inner union of opposites
The original Christians were still persecuted. In order to be really sure when meeting each other that you were dealing with another Christian, you revealed yourself with a secret ritual.
The first person used a stick to draw a circle in the dirt. The other person then painted a second circle that overlaps half with the first.
To shorten the whole thing, you could instead only draw a certain fraction of the circular line and the second person added the opposite line, so you only use a section of the overall figure, which then resembles a fish.
This fish, which consists of two opposite segments of a circle, is still used today as an identifier by Christians.
If the fins of the fish are also trimmed, the almond-shaped figure is then called vesica piscis (Latin) or mandorla (from Italian = almond).
Saints, especially (but not only) in Christianity, are often shown in an almond-shaped golden aura, which is also called mandorla.
The union of the opposites between the feminine and the masculine, the yin and the yang, the light and the shadow, was one of the most important spiritual pillars of original Christianity.
Unfortunately, we seem to have almost forgotten this old spiritual wisdom nowadays … Or, has it even been kept hidden from us?
If you look at old pictures of Jesus with a mandorla, four symbols are usually always shown:
- Human
- Eagle
- Ox
- Lion
These four figures come from Revelation 4:7. The official interpretation says that these figures symbolize the four apostles. But I find the reason for this more than flimsy.
My personal interpretation: The original Christians knew very well about the sacred element theory!
- Human (more precisely: woman!) = water
- Eagle = air
- Ox = earth
- Lion = fire
The mandorla (vesica piscis) shows us that we will only find perfection and enlightenment with the right balance between the opposites of polarity. The four elements can help us find this balance. I have already written about this in another blog article.
Caution, conspiracy theory!
This article would not be complete if I did not at least briefly go into the so-called Illuminati, the Cabal or even the real rulers who are supposed to pull the strings in secret.
Although, whether these really exist or whether they just came from our imagination is completely irrelevant to my statement.
In any case, the founding fathers of the American dollar once left us a clear sign on their bills.
You probably know it …
A pyramid is an exciting symbol. When viewed from the front, we first see an isosceles triangle. There is a left and a right (polarity).
Seen in three-dimensional space, a pyramid with its four side faces even shows double polarity – or the four elements.
And then there is the top of the pyramid, which shows the all-seeing eye of God in this famous symbol.
This reminds me of a quote from the Bible …
“If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!
Matthew 6:22-23
The eye should be single (in the German Bible: simple). We should not see with the left and right, but rather take a higher perspective (or use our third eye to see) and recognize that light and dark, cold and hot, left and right, female and male, and yes: good and bad, are imperative parts of a world based on the laws of polarity.
If therefore the light that is in thee be [also] darkness, how great is that darkness! Here, we are told that what we call light draws an equally large shadow.
By the way, to draw an isosceles triangle, you need a compass and a ruler according to Euclid’s element theory. Two overlapping circles are drawn, the shape of the vesica piscis.
The symbol appears both at the pyramid of Giza and the Sphinx, as well as on St. Peter’s Square in Rome and in the Washington Monument, as can be found with a simple Google image search.
Everyone can now come up with their own conspiracy theories. ?
But it seems to be a fairly important and fairly sacred symbol.
The vesica piscis shows the union of the polarities between light and shadow, between female and male, between top and bottom.
Original Christianity is based on this truth.
Only, if we learn the unification and balance, between our inner and outer opposites, between our light and our shadow, between our female side and our male parts, only if we understand both sides equally, accept them and work actively with them, only then will we continue to develop – personally and also as mankind.
So let’s look at our shadow.
Let us bring the world back into balance.
First, within us.
Then, around us.
Regarding the major disasters and crises of our time, Carl Gustav Jung was sometimes asked: “Will we make it?”
His regular response was: “When enough people do their inner work”.
[:]
