“Only one who has tasted freedom can feel the longing to make everything analogous to it, to spread it throughout the whole universe. One who does not…merely imitates what others do without any feeling for why they do it.”
— Friedrich Schelling
This applies not only to one who has tasted freedom but also one who has tasted slavery, or experienced the very worst of life, and learned to tell the difference. Since slavery is the shadow of freedom.
Given the human mind’s propensity to confuse freedom for power it is not surprising that many continue barking up this tree. But even so, the exaltation of power over freedom takes on a particular flavour in the place and time we find ourselves in.
Carl Jung warned that while every individual needs “inner revolution…overflow of the existing order and renewal,” that this is not to be achieved “by forcing them upon his neighbours under the hypocritical cloak of Christian love or the sense of social responsibility or any of the other beautiful euphemisms for unconscious urges to personal power.”
In today’s climate, such beautiful euphemisms can be extended to include new age spiritual platitudes, along with personal achievement, specialness and status. Because even these are acceptable justifications today for forcing your unchecked needs onto others.
Displays of conceit and competence, being aspects of the western cultural persona, are harder to spot from within, and so they have a way of slipping through the net, remaining unseen, or rationalised away as something positive. This means an unnatural situation gets prolonged longer than it otherwise would, before some outside force comes along to reckon with it.
But where is such a force to come from? Unconscious social power play remains rife and rampant in modern western culture, and it’s a quality it has been exporting. This won’t only be an outside force, but the very consequences that those who seek it are inviting into their world.
This is not merely the result of something repressed. Quite the opposite. An overly firm handshake or two; a contemptuous gaze; compulsive contrarianism; an ostentatious yawn; disagreeing in tone while agreeing in words; hot and cold charades; a patronising pat on the shoulder; tactical attention switching; a threatening stare in the corner of your eye; playing the game of ‘who looks away first.’ All your life you have been taught to ignore behaviours such as these, or to reframe them as something that they aren’t.
Not only do few realise their own motivations in performing them, but they actually think they are good for doing it. They just think they are networking, ‘being effective,’ or doing things the ‘right way.’ It has nothing to do with hiding their true inner workings. And if it does then no one else in the room is smart enough to notice.
Not even a healthy dose of travel, outwardly or inwardly, can help shift this junk where the person themselves is not truly willing to honour it. Many go in to these experiences seeking only sensation, and come out having tasted only power; both sides of it. They might go to hell, but they’ll blame it on their circumstances. Consciousness costs something that they’re not genuinely willing to pay.
Sadly those best equipped to perceive such dynamics are also by default among the least equipped to handle them in the moment. That is, at least, until attempts are made at integration.
I myself fall into this category. I feel compelled not to be the ‘middle man,’ who just goes along and betrays himself for not calling out what he sees. But in person I’ve often given others the benefit of the doubt. Even where, truth be told, there wasn’t any.
Indeed there is the doubt that originates in the individuals themselves.
It’s a curious feature of shadow work that, when you are confident in wielding it, the situations requiring it of you tend to decrease in frequency and magnitude. Just as when something within you needs work, the mind and outer world conspire to present it.
Those whose swords are correctly calibrated shall inherit the earth. Something has to reckon with this cartoon we find ourselves in.
Wherever you are in the world, will you join me in calling out this nonsense when you see it? Because whether you do or don’t, I sure as hell will.
