Shadow and Light: 21st Century Spirituality Part 3 a

The psychological aspect of 21 st Century Spirituality is powerfully important. My central premise here is this: 90% of what passes for spirituality and/or religion is actually a psychological defense against 3 specific traumatizing  conflicts that are inherent to the human experience:

a) our existential reality - particularly the reality of death and the fact of the limitations of personal power
b) our personal suffering, the reality of emotional pain, and
c) other related feelings, thoughts and experiences that  are in conflict with societal pressure to identify with one's conditioned persona in order to be accepted.

All three of these conflicts create a collection of emotions and thoughts that get relegated to what Jung callled the shadow. The shadow consists of anything we have disowned, repressed, or pushed out of our conscious awareness. We disidentify with our shadow material and project it out onto the world, other people, other races, the devil etc...

Classic examples of shadow material include anger,  sexuality, vulnerability, sadness, fear, power.

Whatever we have learnt in our families or societies to judge and deny goes into the shadow. Think of the shadow as a bag that contains everything that is repressed, judged, feared - everything that we have conflict about. These could be obvious things like anger or sadness, or less obvious things like intelligence, beauty or creativity, depending on what we learned in our families and societies.

Now, an effective spiritual awareness practice has to include very serious attention to working with the shadow. Without the shadow work, the spiritual self becomes merely a variation on the conditioned persona, and spirituality becomes a new language for reinforcing the old repressions, denials and even further candy coating of life's difficulties.

Authentic spiritual practice recognizes that it is the honest, straightforward, compassionate act of bringing awareness to these difficulties that begins real spiritual growth. But this is very difficult, because the shadow has a virtual moat of defensive energy around it - we will rationalize, deny, project, avoid in extraordinary ways to prevent ever dealing with what has been put in the shadow bag. This may seem silly, but this psychological conditioning is primal and deeply rooted in our most primitive fears - so much so that otherwise intelligent and ratiional people will convince themselves of all manner of unreasonable and impossible things in order to maintian the unconscious status quo between shadow and light.

Old world religion pereptuates (and is actually part of what created) the splitting off of shadow material - we have god and the devil, the saved and the damned, the good people and the evil people, spirit and flesh - all of the familiar dualities are rooted in a schism within the personal self that is at war with it's own shadow.

The New Age approach to spirituality actually does exactly the same thing, it just updates the language and translates the dualities into concepts that fit our narcissistic era.

The big problem in this regard with both religion and New Age spirituality is that they propose otherworldly solutions or interventions. They posit supernatural beings, be they deities, saviours, extraterrestrials or angels, that will make everything OK. They support metaphysical grand narratives about the creation of the world as well as it's end - wether it comes through armageddon or the prophecies of the mayan calendar. They perpetuate the schism, wether it is in the form of trying to get to heaven by repressing and denying your shadow, or in the insipid attempt to create your own reality through incessantly policing your thoughts to make sure they are in alignment with your highest intentions.

Both religion and the New Age support the holding of unproven a priori beliefs that are not questioned. Authentic spirituality is the very act of questioning, of inquiring into the very nature of existence and consiousness - this is blocked almost completely by the a priori, unprovable beliefs that most will invest in as spirituality. Ironic and tragic.

All of this springs from, and is clung to in service of, avoidance of the three conflicts I mentioned above. A viable 21st Century Spirituality has to face and work with this scary yet powerfully transformational material.

The more honest we are about these three conflicts, the less need we feel to seek artificial and stunting  protection from pre-rational religion and spirituality. Though understanding the cognitive developmental process I have been describing, and applying the spiritual practice principles I will cover soon will provide both an intellectual context and an experiential process within which to make the leap, it is the psychological aspect that is all important,, particularly the shadow work. Because it is the intensity of the charge held in the shadow material that drives our addiction to the pre-rational defense, it will be the compassionate and courageous work with that shadow material that will reduce the power that pre-rational superstition holds over our cognitive abilities and create space for an authentic spiritual experience to arise.

This is no small statement . Think about the holy wars, crusades, jihads, cult suicides, and allegiance to criminally abusive gurus that we are all aware of - these are extreme examples of the very dynamic i am describing, and the consequence of the lack of shadow work in spiritual life. Think about the Christian drive toward the rapture that inspires a significant contingent in the American power structure, the Islamic and Judaic metaphysics that drive the middle eastern madness, the magenta UV ray, channelled information, astrological nonsense that captivates the new age adherents.

To paraphrase John Lennon, imagine that above us there is only sky - where then do we find meaning if not in the experience of grown-up honest adult consciousness?