Shadow

Let me lift one out to study.

“Taking it in its deepest sense, the shadow is the invisible saurian tail that man still drags behind him. Carefully amputated, it becomes the healing serpent of the mysteries. Only monkeys parade with it.”

How does one amputate the shadow?
What does it mean to carefully amputate the shadow?

And what does it mean to parade with it?

Am I parading with my shadow when I talk down on people whom I think are being stupid?

Is rap music parading with the shadow, or is it rather the healing serpent?
Or both?

What precisely is the fucking shadow?
What is your shadow, if I may ask?

Reading history convinced me of the same. The soldiers in the Rape of nanking, the concentration camp staff, they weren’t particularly evil, it was just an psychic adaptation to the times. Adaptation is the wrong word really, more like the times just summoned the shadows which were always there, or gave no reason for people to keep a lid on them anymore.

Any realistic society should take into account not only our better natures, but our worse natures too, when building itself. Remove moral hazards and boom, everyone’s more moral.

Yes. The Stanford Prison Experiment stands out as a definitive proof of this stuff.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_ … experiment

Yes, and how has this been done, how can it be done now?

And, there is both the shadow of society, of masses, and of personal humans individually.

How do we go about taking into account the individual shadow?

Im just asking now - as, to be frank, Ive been wiser in this regard than I am now.

We’ll need a context of course.

A shadow in what sense, relating to what set of circumstances, understood in what particular way?

That’s exactly why Freud kicked Jung out of his set. The moment Jung started getting all spooky Freud was like ‘bro I can’t roll with you anymore. You sound like a philosopher or something.’

Yes, thats what Im basically asking. Not sure if I should be expecting responses because its damned hard to figure out about oneself, and if one figures it out it isn’t necessarily something one would like to share. Maybe.

But okay. You were in a war. Could I ask you to focus on that and tell me something, which applies to any of Jungs quotes above?

I didn’t know about that.

“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” That kind of optimistic bullshit needs to go for a start.

When a developer codes a game, or an app or an OS, they realise that someone somewhere will try to hack, crack or otherwise exploit it. So they beta-test it. Run it in a sandbox, throw it to white-hat hackers for a good going over. We should do the same to social institutions.

Governments should employ thieves, perverts, gangsters, terrorists, embezllers and other assorted ne’er-do-wells to troubleshoot themselves perhaps lol.

“Governments should employ thieves, perverts, gangsters, terrorists, embezllers and other assorted ne’er-do-wells to troubleshoot themselves perhaps lol.”

I like that.
That has some meat on it.

Can we transpose this to the individual?

Well, as matter of fact, I was in a war. The Vietnam war. I went over there a gung-ho, red-blooded American Christian, ready to kick the Communists ass. I returned a radical left-wing atheist who tossed away his Bronze Star medal and Army Commendation medal with a V-device for valor on April 19th 1972, the one year anniversary of Operation Dewey Canyon III protest in Washington D.C. Just tossed them into a dumpster outside my apartment complex. At the time a very powerful and very personal experience. Just me, myself and I.

Ironically enough, not more than a couple of miles from where I live now. And I’ve lived all over the Baltimore metropolitan area.

But now, years later, I am considerably more ambivalent about all of the things I did back then. From the radical right to the radical left. Back in my own “objectivist days”.

As for Jung, how would those here who share in any of the points he raised above react to what I did back then? How would the Freudians?

Jung:

“The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.”

How does that fit into my reaction to the Vietnam war? Damned if I know. What the hell does this even mean in regard to any particular individual facing any particular situation in which moral and political narratives come into conflict?

More to the point [mine] in terms of your own interactions with others involving “considerable moral effort”, what does it mean to you?

Cite a situation you have been in that allows you to describe it more substantively.

Same with all the other quotes. They are all just “general description intellectual contraptions” to me.

But if anyone here would like to reconfigure one of them into an assessment of a particular set of circumstances they have been in such that this “shadow” becomes more substantial, I’d be interested in exploring that.

To me your shadow is your dark side and because it is your shadow it cannot be separated from you but remains a part of you always
So I think Jung was wrong when he implies that it can be separated from you physically because your experiences define who you are
He is right however in that it is the dark within someone but it never leaves you although it may significantly change shade over time

I think that is determined by the degree to which one accepts responsibility for oneself more than the actual things themselves
Once done ayn action cannot be undone but introspection is always a process that will be ongoing until resolution has occurred

The dark side is always there both potentially and actually - potentially for what can or will be done and actually for what has been done

Evil is more noticeable in the individual because it is so brutal compared to the norm but on a truly grand scale it then becomes the norm
That famous phrase banality of evil allows anything at all to be seen as morally unremarkable if it is sufficiently widespread and accepted

The question is why are people unaware of what is going on in their subconscious ?
A part of the answer is that the subconscious itself does not fully reveal itself to us

Also there may be those who do not want to look into the abyss for fear of what they may see
But this may be more preferable to not looking in at all - ignorance is after all not always bliss

Once done any action cannot be undone but introspection is always a process that will be ongoing until resolution has occurred
Sometimes it can simply be a question of allowing sufficient time to pass in order for the healing process to become complete

Other times it may require therapy because the individual cannot heal by themselves because they do not know how
There is so much we do not reveal to others but it is necessary for our well being that we try and do it to ourselves

To go through suffering and to emerge from it damaged but also more complete because one has survived
It strengthens one psychologically and philosophically and prepares them for possible future suffering too

One probably never truly heals because there will always be something left behind even if we do not know
As that may be necessary to protect ourselves if we ever need a defence for events that are yet to happen

The subconcious apparently controls everything but can we ever fully understand it through the conscious ?
Is trying to understand it even the right way - is it not better to simply let it be without expecting answers ?

Eighteen years ago I went into a black hole that I had absolutely no control over that tried to kill me
I am out of it now but I bet you my life my subconscious has retained the memory until the day I die

But what if, Your show is playing games with you, like it makes you think you are out of it? :

Or did You so it kind of like this guy describes? :

youtu.be/ictUbyRBW6Y

Yes I didn’t mean a hypothetical, its known you’re a veteran of that war.
Thanks for the elaborations, this is interesting stuff to me, as it is directly pertinent and you answer your own question;

This would be the beginning of that moral effort.
I’d think.
But far from the end of it, as you also clarify.

What’s Baltimore like these days - you recognize it in The Wire?

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6EpfCzdMoY[/youtube]

I would say that you threw yourself on the Shadow immediately, as did a lot of Vietnam veterans.
Their confrontation of it became a whole corpus of literature, music and film and formed a basis of a new national conscience.

But, the shadow is elusive.
As it is in oneself.

Jordan Peterson says of the Shadow that it is the capacity for cruelty.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6VRWX1Sz5s[/youtube]

Well yes, this is a distinction, a problem I also noticed;
We have the individual shadow and then he societal shadow which is far larger, and yet, the same.

The elusiveness of the shadow points to the mystery of separation and unity of the individual and his world. Thats a thought that comes to me now, writing this.

it means so very, very much.
My life, dude, I can not even tell you a single detail. Its unfortunate. Lurkers.

But in general, Ive always made a great effort to bring to light the darkness where I would rather not recognize it.
One thing I can tell you: People who consider themselves “light workers” are usually the very opposite. Demons, sick people.

I suppose this is in part why I was so drawn to Nietzsche, and in particular his darker side. I never had the slightest faith in anything that wasn’t addressing the very heart of darkness.

Looking to deeply will break the average person.

Most “spiritual” people are wretched; their “spirituality” is merely an excuse to not look into their heart, which rots away as they preach of peace and love.
They will defile children telling themselves they are “healing” them. Their sexual urges ooze through the pores of their “body of light”.

Most therapists are simply projecting their own shadow onto their patients.
Ive visited around… Id say 6 therapists in my life, all but one for very short periods because they were completely useless and obscenely vain. The least bad of them was simply salivating over my stories and said to me that he’d never had such interesting casework. He did nothing whatsoever to help me with any of it and still took my money.

Ive had one good therapist though and I stayed with him for a year. He was able to identify a very important thing.
Even still he had all kinds of opinions about the human species and politics he was fond of sharing with me in the time I was paying for. But at least he wasn’t projecting. I dare say this guy is pretty wise. He’s also the only one of them that refused insurance coverage as it would compel him to share his diagnoses with the State.