Shadow
"Anyway," I continued, "my point here is that the life review emphasizes love and knowledge. Since God is all-knowing, and we are God, then knowledge can be characterized as remembering Who We Really Are. And Who We Really Are is pure love and light. This passage talks about this process of en-light-enment…"
And so the first thing to do is to stop making these judgments against yourself. Learn what is the soul’s desire, and go with that. Go with the soul. What the soul is after is — the highest feeling of love you can imagine. This is the soul’s desire. This is its purpose. The soul is after the feeling. Not the knowledge, but the feeling. It already has the knowledge, but knowledge is conceptual. Feeling is experiential. The soul wants to feel itself, and thus to know itself in its own experience.
The highest feeling is the experience of unity with All That Is. This is the great return to Truth for which the soul yearns. This is the feeling of perfect love.
Perfect love is to feeling what perfect white is to color. Many think that white is the absence of color. It is not. It is the inclusion of all color. White is every other color that exists, combined.
So, too, is love not the absence of an emotion (hatred, anger, lust, jealousy, covetousness), but the summation of all feeling. It is the sum total. The aggregate amount. The everything.
Thus, for the soul to experience perfect love, it must experience every human feeling.
How can I have compassion on that which I don’t understand? How can I forgive in another that which I have never experienced in Myself? So we see both the simplicity and the awesome magnitude of the soul’s journey. We understand at last what it is up to:
The purpose of the human soul is to experience all of it — so that it can be all of it.
How can it be up if it has never been down, left if it has never been right? How can it be warm if it knows not cold, good if it denies evil? Obviously the soul cannot choose to be anything if there is nothing to choose from. For the soul to experience its grandeur, it must know what grandeur is. This it cannot do if there is nothing but grandeur. And so the soul realizes that grandeur only exists in the space of that which is not grand. The soul, therefore, never condemns that which is not grand, but blesses — seeing in it a part of itself which must exist for another part of itself to manifest.
The job of the soul, of course, is to cause us to choose the grandeur — to select the best of Who You Are — without condemning that which you do not select.
This is a big task, taking many lifetimes, for you are wont to rush to judgment, to call a thing “wrong” or “bad” or “not enough,” rather than to bless what you do not choose.
You do worse than condemn — you actually seek to do harm to that which you do not choose. You seek to destroy it. If there is a person, place, or thing with which you do not agree, you attack it. If there is a religion that goes against yours, you make it wrong. If there is a thought that contradicts yours, you ridicule it. If there is an idea other than yours, you reject it. In this you err, for you create only half a universe. And you cannot even understand your half when you have rejected out of hand the other.
This is all very profound — and I thank you. No one has ever said these things to me. At least, not with such simplicity. And I am trying to understand. Really, I am. Yet some of this is difficult to grapple with. You seem to be saying, for instance, that we should love the “wrong” so that we can know the “right.” Are you saying we must embrace the devil, so to speak?
How else do you heal him? Of course, a real devil does not exist — but I reply to you in the idiom you choose.
Healing is the process of accepting all, then choosing best. Do you understand that? You cannot choose to be God if there is nothing else to choose from.
Oops, hold it! Who said anything about choosing to be God?
The highest feeling is perfect love, is it not?
Yes, I should think so.
And can you find a better description of God?
No, I cannot.
Well, your soul seeks the highest feeling. It seeks to experience — to be — perfect love.
It is perfect love — and it knows this. Yet it wishes to do more than know it. It wishes to be it in its experience.
Of course you are seeking to be God! What else did you think you were up to?
Neale Donald Walsch
"The important part here," I said, "is this line: So, too, is love not the absence of an emotion (hatred, anger, lust, jealousy, covetousness), but the summation of all feeling. It is the sum total. The aggregate amount. The everything.
This is the same core pattern behind Carl Jung's idea of the shadow. The shadow consists of all the aspects of yourself that you've denied and disowned. Imagine that you are a giant castle with hundreds of different rooms. There is a room for every one of your perceived 'positive' traits — love, joy, beauty, kindness. There are also rooms for every one of your perceived 'negative' traits — hypocrisy, arrogance, conceit, laziness, stupidity, ugliness.
When we come into this world, all the doors in our castle are open. We are born whole. But as we go through life, we learn that certain traits are not acceptable and will render us unlovable. We learn that it's not okay to be weird, or outspoken, or emotional or lazy or weak or arrogant because somewhere, at some point, someone taught us that those things were shameful and wrong.
As a result, we close the door on all the 'unacceptable' traits in ourselves — even the 'positive' ones. This throws half our castle into darkness, and monsters breed in the shadows. Whenever something in the outside world shines a light on our shadow, the monster attacks. Whenever you're triggered by something in the outside world, it's not the outside world that's the problem — it's your shadow. If you didn't have a shadow, you wouldn't be triggered.
Rejecting and fragmenting yourself is not unconditional love. Unconditional love is seeing and accepting all of yourself — the 'good' and the 'bad' (because both are subjective labels). That's why unconditional love is every color of the fucking rainbow. It is pure white light. You don't truly love yourself until you've integrated your shadow; until you can look at all the 'ugly' parts of your psyche and accept them with open arms while still choosing to express the best parts of yourself. Integrating your shadow is much easier said than done."
"Do you have a shadow?" Zac asked.
"Of course," I chuckled.
"Can you give me an example?"
"You've already seen several examples tonight. What's one word I hate being called?"
"Woo woo?" Zac grinned.
"Yep. 'Woo woo' is just one facet of my shadow. If you call me woo woo, I'll rip your head off."
"Why do you have such a strong reaction to that word?"
"Because my Dad calls me woo woo, and he's a man of science who values intelligence and rationality. In my head, it's a phrase synonymous with 'Your ideas are stupid and not worth listening to. Therefore, you're stupid and not worth listening to.'"
"I'm sure he doesn't mean it that way-"
"Oh, I know he doesn't mean it that way," I laughed. "Ironically, he is right. I am 'woo woo' when it comes to some of my silly beliefs — like the completely irrational belief that my Dad thinks I'm stupid.
Actually, I can all but guarantee the scientific community shares the same shadow as me: the word 'irrational.' Their entire profession espouses the virtues of rationality and ridicules faith, illogical dogma, and religion. Yet I've just demonstrated that they literally are the very thing they have denied in themselves. They have put their head in the sand and refused to look at inconvenient evidence that has existed for many, many decades. They've maintained faith in materialism without questioning it — as if materialism were a religion. They've even censored and ridiculed other scientists who dared challenge their dogma. Yet if you call a scientist 'dogmatic' to their face, they'll spout off some bullshit about changing their mind based on evidence. My entire thesis shines a very bright light on their shadow, so, naturally, they'll have a gut-level emotional reaction to what I have to say. They may even try to shoot the messenger because it's easier to vilify me than to acknowledge the irrational part of themselves that they've denied for so long.
The shadow is a major reason our modern society is going to shit. The media sets the standard for what is good and perfect and morally acceptable. No one has permitted us to be all of ourselves without shame or judgment. We don't have permission to be angry or ugly or in pain. These days, if you say one controversial thing that the Thought Police disagrees with, you risk being publicly shamed or doxxed or canceled. So people don't say what they think, and the shadow grows deeper and darker in society. Then the Thought Police wonder why Donald Trump gets elected when the polls said he wouldn't. When you create a shadow in society, you can't be surprised when people say one thing and mean another. Again, this is incredibly basic logic.
Even the spiritual 'New Age' culture teaches us to sugar-coat pain with light, love, and positivity. Apparently, if you feel anything other than that, you're a 'negative' person — and, of course, nobody in our society likes a 'negative' person. This is also a toxic idea. It encourages us to run and hide from the painful truth, instead of staring it in the face and feeling it wash over us. And then we wonder why our society is addicted to drugs, food, alcohol, social media — all the things that numb us and distract us from acknowledging our own shadow. Remember — what you resist, persists. If we could dissolve society's shadow, the world would be a much better place. We must learn to 'accept all, then choose best,' as God says."