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Austin Sanderson

What Lurks in the Shadow

Urban Sadhu Exploration October 2024




PYS 1.33 maitrī-karuṇā-muditā-upekṣānāṃ sukha-duḥkha-puṇya-apuṇya-viṣayāṇāṃ bhāvanātaḥ citta-prasādanam  


Meaning: Through cultivation of friendliness, compassion, joy, and indifference to our emotional extremes such as pleasure and pain, virtue and vice, the mind becomes favorably disposed, serene, and benevolent. – Austin Sanderson 


Over my many years of teaching yoga as a spiritual endeavor, I find myself in conversation where a student will ask, “If God is unconditional love, then why so many evils in the world? Why does God allow for this evil?” and the answer is one that is not very satisfying for many who ask.

 

It’s confusing for many of us who talk about a benevolent higher power and then have to deal with the evil that we see around us in the world. We project the onus of responsibility for evil in the world onto that higher power. But is God the source of evil in the world, or do we humans need to take the burden of responsibility? Maybe the question should be, “Why do humans allow so much evil in the world?”

 

Animals are programmed to do one thing in life, a woodpecker pecks wood, a bee collects pollen, but humans, on the other hand, are more complex thinkers. Humans have the ability to analyze thoughts and acts, make judgement about those thoughts and actions, and act upon the analyzation. Unfortunately, this does not mean that humans always take the high moral road of “love and light”.

 

Both modern psychology and ancient yoga recognize that humans, (unlike other animals) have what Carl Jung called a “shadow self”; to put it another way, we have a “virtuous nature” and a “transgressive nature,” the “shadow self.” Sage Patanjali in his Yoga Sutras calls the “shadow self” a kleshas” (blocks). This shadow self is a combination of not only the worst of human nature, such as egoism, hate, anger, fear, unbridled sexuality, and untamed animal impulses that society suppresses, but could also include elements and characteristics that are life affirming but may challenge society’s social norms. The dark and evil attributes stand out to us, but the positive parts of the shadow self are harder to understand because of human socialization. Have you ever been laughed at for being a creative dreamer? Or scolded for being assertive? Maybe you’ve been told not to be so ambitious and competitive because it’s problematic to others. These good qualities are also part of what Jung sees as our shadow self because of the suppression of by social constructs. It is important to note that Jung and Patanjali do not see eye to eye on everything, but they would both agree that the conflict within the shadow self (and/or the kleshas) both stem from the small ego personality.

 

Carl Jung’s concept of evil and the shadow self is complex and dynamic. He once said,  “We are so full of apprehensions, fears, that we don't know exactly to what it points ... a great change of our psychological attitude is imminent, that is certain ... because we need more understanding of human nature .... The only real danger that exists is man himself... and we know nothing of man – his psyche should be studied because we are the origin of all coming evil ...” When Jung spoke of evil, he was not just speaking of the type of evil in the world that is so easy to point out and condemn such as human genocide but evils that we go along with because culture and society condone them. For example, a culture that spends trillions on militarization and accepts abject poverty within its society, or a culture of gun violence where gun owners’ rights outweigh common sense on how to protect the public from weapons for violence. A meat-eating culture that turns a blind eye to the pain and suffering of over 55 billion animals that are killed yearly in the US alone to feed the flesh-eating lust of a culture drunk on the blood of suffering animals.

 

Jung points out that humans need to study their own psyche to understand their own nature. He calls this study “psychology”, a study of cognitive, emotional, and social behavior with the intention of making the unconscious conscious. Sage Patanjali has a similar approach – he says that a yogi must self-study, a process called “Svadhyaya”, so that the yogi can make the unconscious conscious but with a final higher intention of Samadhi (yoga), a total liberation from the individual body, mind, ego, thoughts, and feelings that every society constructs. In truth Patanjali’s higher intention is that of a deep spiritual practice, but that is not to say that Jung is not spiritual in his approach.

 

Jung points out that there is not only an inner personal shadow self, but that societies have a shadow self. To reach a higher consciousness we have to study both, a study of both the inner and the other. Also a process we see in the yoga tradition through the practice of Yama and Niyama, external restrictions and internal observation.

 

In Owning Your Own Shadow, Robert A. Johnson points out, “The tendency to see one’s shadow `out there’ in one’s neighbor or in another race or culture is the most dangerous aspect of the modern psyche. It has created two devastating wars in this century and threatens the destruction of all the fine achievements of our modern world. We all decry war but collectively we move toward it. It is not the monsters of the world who make such chaos but the collective shadow to which every one of us has contributed.” That projection of otherness also happens when we project human beings’ evil acts onto God and refuse to take responsibility for our own actions as individuals and as the human species. Johnson adds, “To honor and accept one’s own shadow is a profound spiritual discipline. It is whole-making and thus holy and the most important experience of a lifetime.”  Accepting does not mean acting upon the shadow, but taking ownership of it and managing it. To “honor” the shadow self is to understand that humanity is the root of evil in the world, so that we can let go of the idea that the root cause of evil is God or beyond our control.

 

Note that shadow work is not an excuse to unleash your bottled-up ‘toxic negativity’ onto the world around you, and it is essential to point out that our goodness and rectitude do not grow into some form of ‘toxic positivity’ by controlling our dark shadow side as some might suggest. When bypassing and ignoring the light or darkness of human nature, the neglected elements can manifest into full-blown moral and ethical decay. The shadow and the light are part of human nature: we must see them both, sit with them both, then confront them both, and be at peace with the shadow and the light that makes us complex beings. Only then can we start to divert and redirect the dark shadow energy away from evil and toward goodness. Shadow work can be both unsettling and greatly rewarding.

Austin Sanderson – Urban Sadhu

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