image credit: Soumen
Carl Jung said, “Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.” This is definitely a conversation where, “angels fear to tread.” It takes great courage to go against our society’s norm and question how idealism plays out in our lives. In truth, to realize wholeness, we have to let go of idealism of what we judge to be good, and open to the possibility that light and dark are two aspects of who we are. Favoring only the light and pushing the darkness into the “closet’ will in fact create more woundedness and attract more darkness. When we reject our dark aspect, it rears its ugly head elsewhere, sometimes in our own lives or in our external environment which, we then rationalize, has nothing to do with us. More importantly, because of our humanness, we can misjudge what we consider to be bad and demonize people and situations. We then shun what is bad with its ensuing dire consequence. We only have to look at our history to see how we subject those whom we judge to be less than good, to destruction, to cruelty and suffering.
Most religions encourage idealism of the good and to transform the darkness into light. This is where the literal understanding of such an imperative can be harmful. Moralists quote the certitude of the injunctions of their religions as the moral code and claim to know absolutely, what is good and what is bad. These ideals are the standards that people must live up to, even though those who preach them, themselves have a difficult time upholding these standards. I question the value of trying to mold ourselves to a directive that dismisses our human nature as bad, creating a split in our psyche. Would it not be more healing to hold all aspects of us as emanations of creation, light and shadow? When we embrace our unconscious impulses as parts of who we are, we do not have to enact them to the extreme, in the form of perversion.
Recognizing that we carry both light and shadow within our psyches, not denying the shadow side, not acting out on it, but acknowledging it, we can be gentle and forgiving with ourselves and consequently with others. I am reminded of a nursery rhyme, “when she was good, she was very, very good; when she was bad, she was horrid.” There is a lot of tension in being very, very good and so when the pendulum swings, the result can be horrid. Thomas Merton, the Catholic monk of the Trappist Order, wrote in Volume Six of his journals, “Solitary life and struggle with illusion: not with objectified exterior devils but with the devils which are illusion about self. Pattern of thought -the expectation of something happening: basically an habitual attitude of mind is an orientation toward “something good happening to me, in me, as a result of my disposing my life in view of such a happening.” … To be fixated in this pattern means that when it is not simply and rapidly brought into effect, one becomes anxious and the “pattern” works itself out in illusory and unpleasant ways. These are good. They show how, and to what extent, the pattern itself is illusory, arbitrary, even self-willed.”
Meditation is important to get clarity and retain a balance in our consciousness. In Shambala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Chogyam Trungpa wrote, “It doesn’t really matter what thoughts you have. In the sitting practice of meditation, whether you have monstrous thoughts or benevolent thoughts, all of them are regarded purely as thinking. They are neither virtuous nor sinful. You might have a thought of assassinating your father or you might want to make lemonade and eat cookies. Please don’t be shocked by your thoughts: any thought is just thinking. No thought deserves a gold medal or a reprimand. Just label your thoughts “thinking,” then go back to your breath.”
A model that embraces all aspects of our light and dark is the myth of the Hindu Goddess Kali: She is depicted as enraged, with red eyes, wearing a garland of human skulls. Kali’s most common four armed image shows her carrying a sword, a severed head and a skull-cup catching the blood of the severed head. The Sword represents divine knowledge and the human head represents the ego which must be slain by divine knowledge in order to attain freedom. Two hands are in the gestures of granting blessings and fearlessness. In spite of her seemingly terrible form, Kali is often considered the kindest and most loving of all the Hindu goddesses, as she is regarded by her devotees as the Mother of the whole Universe. And, because of her terrible form she is also often seen as a great protector.
The path to wholeness asks that we acknowledge all that we are, for within each of us, we carry the archetypes of the mass consciousness. All of creation exists as the form of the consciousness of God. The manifestations of Consciousness simply are. It is we who judge them to be good or bad, and in so doing embrace what we label as good and reject what we label as bad. To heal on all levels we have to come to realize what Thomas Merton wrote in his journals, ” One thing has suddenly hit me—that nothing counts except love and that a solitude that is not simply the wide-openness of love and freedom is nothing. Love and solitude are the one ground of true maturity and freedom…True solitude embraces everything, for it is the fullness of love that rejects nothing and no one, is open to All in All.”
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