There are two guarantees in life, as the saying goes. Actually there are three.
Death – because everything alive must die, but moreover because everything that exists must encounter negation, by virtue of the very same forces that brought it about.
Taxes – or more essentially impositions on our will. Not to say there’s anything inherently wrong with ‘taxes,’ but that any wilful being that comes into existence must come up against impositions on its freedom.
These first two are simply internal and external forms of the same negation that we must all encounter – two sides of the same coin, arising from the same source.
What this aphorism conspicuously misses however is the synthesis – the third piece that completes the dialectic – what to do about it, and that is that life must develop self-consciousness. This is the great opportunity inherent to life.
There is no endeavour that does not pertain to self-knowledge. Whether we are learning about biology, astronomy, astrology, mathematics, aesthetics, morality or building a business. These can all ultimately be construed as exercises in the pursuit of self-knowledge; the attempt to get at ‘what there is.’ Except that they are not necessarily, because all can equally be construed as exercises in the very avoidance of self-knowledge. There are even pursuits for which the very avoidance of self-knowledge is what defines them. That is, whether they are done with the intention of learning more about the self or with the intention to avoid the self and all that entails. Nonetheless, it is the pursuit of self-knowledge, or the active avoidance of it, that sits behind all activity.
There is also no pursuit that, with the right intention, can not lead to greater self knowledge. From learning a language to building a business to any relationship – whether the outcome is a desirable one or not from the initial standpoint of the ego – self-knowledge is the outcome. You either win or you learn, as the adage goes. But who’s to say that learning is not the real ‘win’? That might be the whole point. How many other outcomes can you say that about? Is this not one of the most philosophically important ideas there is?
All of this opens up vital lines of enquiry into the nature of our minds and existence. Why is it that life does not simply depend on making the world conform, controlling things in just the right way to make them meet our pre-existing preferences? Why is it that we cannot just find that elusive one set of values that is objectively best for everyone and fix on it permanently? Why is it that despite the fact that few overtly desire conflict, it seems unavoidable not just interpersonally but on a terrifying societal scale? Why are there no one-size-fits-all answers to everything? Why is everything ‘impermanent,’ as a Buddhist would remind us? These truths about existence are self-evident, yet by and large we continue to behave as though we don’t believe them. And why, despite all evidence to the contrary, do our minds continue to insist on presenting the world to us as though permanence and control were possible? After all, we do seem to find ourselves as singular objects, bags of flesh walking around in this giant game of lego we call the world.
Materialism may be a symptom but it’s not the cause. It is merely an effect of this function of our minds. It’s only natural that our minds must operate in this way and it has always been the case. Materialism being just one expression of it. Georg Hegel, the great systemiser of German idealism, recognised that all perspectives are necessary moments in a great unfolding. None of them are entirely wrong – all contain elements of truth but none are the whole truth. He and his contemporaries particularly Schelling were a great influence on Carl Jung, directly and indirectly. Jung, incidentally, was overtly critical of Hegel, describing him as “that great psychologist in philosopher’s garb.” But could Hegel not have said the reverse about Jung?
It was Jung who coined the concept of the shadow. A popular term but with no agreed upon definition. It is described and thought about in many different ways, but most often in psychological terms – it is the ‘dark side’ of the personality, the part of ourselves we do not like and repress. The shadow is also the archetypal challenger and opposition, a role not exclusively the remit of psychology. In his later work, Aion, Jung even described becoming conscious of the shadow as “the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.” Hence the shadow aligns perfectly with the idealists’ understanding of how consciousness evolves through negation.
As mentioned Jung was building on a long line of thinkers that continues to this day, with its roots reaching far back into the ancient past. Although he claimed not to be a metaphysician or a philosopher, the nature of his psychology meant that he necessarily engaged with these disciplines, leading countless others to project these roles onto him. Endless questions and publications attest to this – Facebook groups abound with questions of ‘what did Jung say about this or that.’ It’s useful to enquire, but the answer we necessarily come to is that Jung too didn’t have all the answers. Neither did he claim to. Such inclinations exemplify the very projections Jung warned about. This tendency points as much to the ever present irony at the heart of our existence as it does to the underlying essence of which the above mentioned disciplines attempt to delineate. Once again we discover ourselves through the image, in this case the assumption of absolute rightness in Jung.
It wasn’t really until the late 19th century that an overlap between psychology and spirituality was explicitly considered. Psychology as a science had only been around for a few decades, yet by other names it has existed for as long as there has been self-consciousness. What we call psychology is an attempt to synthesise our innate spirituality with the rational antithesis of materialist thought. Hence the term ‘psychospiritual’ – a little fancy but it makes the point. But this is not to stop it too being mis-directed, wielded to nefarious ends – taking the mere ‘packaging’ of psychology and missing the point entirely.
All of this is an attempt to circumambulate and light up the real task. Although this is as much as one can do because nothing ever said or written down can wholly capture it. All words, ideas and models themselves represent mere moments. They can be useful vehicles and by the same token they quickly become traps. For as long as we are projecting ourselves into a model, that’s not the real thing. The real thing is your own pursuit of self-knowledge and that is how it has to be.
As Friedrich Schelling wrote over 200 years ago: “This is not the time to reawaken old oppositions, but rather to seek what lies above and beyond all opposition.” There is no doubt he appreciated the timelessness of irony. And the timing of irony.
Schelling was a key influence on Freud and Jung and yet his profoundest thoughts on spirit, freedom and morality, like those of his idealist contemporaries, have scarcely made their way into modern thinking. Culturally we’ve been busy focusing on materialism and materialist thought, for better and worse, bringing with it many benefits of its own along with many tragic disasters and delusions. Figuring out how to wrangle with existence has been a cultural priority. Not to mention that the enormous spiritual task implied by the idealists’ work means a paradigm shift in the fullest sense of the term; far greater than the move from religious absolutism to materialism – that looks like a mere stepping stone by comparison. It requires a total overhaul of our psychic operating systems.
So this is a bit of an awkward way to introduce a model, and yet there’s nothing wrong with models for the reasons mentioned. We need them. The time has come to approach them with this understanding so brilliantly elucidated by these great enlightenment and post-enlightenment thinkers of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Freud, Jung and others – that you are not discovering a model – you are discovering yourself through a model. That said it is important that any model honestly and accurately depicts the workings of your mind, otherwise it would be of limited use or even counterproductive. Life itself can be read like a Rorschach test, or a tarot spread. However there are such things as more and less accurate models of mind, and tarot decks of superior and inferior symbolic integrity. All can be just as much tools of misdirection, applied with the intention to extract aspects of your own selfhood and trap them – into the object or the individual wielding them – and keep them trapped. Although this is ultimately a futile endeavour serving little purpose other than to reveal one’s ignorance in their attempts to bend the absolute to themselves.
Arguably the greatest thinker in elucidating this phenomenon – that of evil – is Schelling. Our culture today has virtually no fleshed-out understanding of a concept of evil. And yet over two centuries have passed since Schelling offered his explanation of what evil is and how it arises. At some point we might be tempted to deny that evil even exists – perhaps because of our own denial of it in ourselves, or because we have not yet personally had to encounter it in its absolute form. But we don’t need to look very far to find evidence. Look out the window, walk down the street, open up your social media. And if that isn’t stark enough simply turn on the news and see what latest global human-driven crisis is being pushed to the limelight. An honest but simple study of any period of history will reveal it bare-faced for all to see, if we’re willing to plainly look at it. While remaining apparently undefinable, evil has a way of actualising itself ever more coarsely until we can no longer deny to ourselves that it’s a thing. You will know it when you see it, you think. But you will also not know it when you see it for this very same reason – because ultimately you must admit that, after all, you actually cannot say what evil is.
Another truth is evident. Our world is not entirely dominated by evil. It is not just a pit of suffering as many eastern traditions postulate. Again some of the most consequential truths are right under our nose, so conspicuous we don’t see them – it contains both good and bad, pleasure and pain, empathy and evil, order and chaos. How often do we stop to think about what this undeniable duality really means and implies? Is duality in everything or just in some things? If the former then why do we ignore or deny it much of the time? And above all, why, if duality is in everything, is there something rather than nothing at all? Would nothing be any worse than what there is? How can a universe even come to be and how can it be justified? If it’s dual, does this imply a kind of neutrality? A reduction to zero?
The pursuit of shadow work itself is no exception to this dynamic. Like any thesis, it too can become one-sided and insist upon itself to the point of nonsense. My initial study of the psychology simply raised more questions than answers. Beginning on the premise that the shadow is in short those aspects of ourselves that we find disagreeable or difficult to confront, next we are to presume that this then shows up in the form of projections, which is a ‘defence mechanism.’
This immediately opens up several more avenues that cannot reasonably be set aside. Why do we find aspects of ourselves disagreeable? Where does this moral judgement come from? What exactly is projection? Why does it happen? Moreover how does it happen, and by what mechanism? And why must it necessarily be that what is being perceived in the other is not in any way accurate? Or that my response to it is ‘bad’ or undesirable or unjustified? Where is the moral philosophy on which all of these judgements are based? Why is it better not to project than to project? And on what basis am I to suppose that the shadow coach’s assessment of myself and the situation carries more weight than my own? Because they said so? And if so is it not on my own authority that I take their expertise and words to be reliable? Me, the one who ostensibly isn’t seeing clearly?
How have I escaped the ‘problem’ of projection here? In denying my own capacity for calling a situation as I see it and outsourcing that to someone else, have I not simply traded one form of projection for another?
To merely observe projection in others, but deny to enquire into how it is happening, is a sin far greater than the apparent sin of projection being observed. As soon as you look under the hood, you see plainly how the approach to shadow work discussed is exhibiting the very same behaviours it presumes to identify in others, only in more sophisticated guise – asserting its own models and judgements onto the world without a solid philosophical framework to base it on beyond mere pragmatism. But this is not true shadow work and this is not true individuation, which precisely means to become undivided in yourself. The idea that you can ‘help’ another do shadow work where they are not helping themselves is a fallacy, and wherever someone is genuinely helping themselves then necessarily their decision stands sovereign. Else what is termed ‘shadow work’ becomes nothing other than another master-slave dynamic of the kind that Hegel described. True self-knowledge requires you to do your own philosophy, while simultaneously maintaining an empathic connection with the world, neither trying to enslave it nor allowing yourself to be its slave.
Indeed you simply cannot undergo any meaningful shadow work without empathy. Empathy is the fundamental quality and propensity that makes shadow work possible. Society’s understanding of empathy, along with its understanding of evil, is commensurately impoverished. Again we think we know what empathy ‘looks like.’ We think of it as ‘feeling another’s pain’ or such like. Looking up definitions of empathy in the dictionary or watching pop-psychology videos on YouTube will offer no help in this regard. The scientific thinking on empathy has become so nebulous that it must resort to classifying multiple ‘kinds’ of empathy – cognitive empathy etc. – in its attempt to make sense of what it sees, without any essential understanding of what empathy actually is.
I’ve made the case that empathy from a psychospiritual perspective can be thought of as the willingness to meet and be transformed with experience. It is essentially to open up a real connection with yourself and the world so that disparate forces can meet, transform and reconcile and that progress can happen. This is why empathy involves feeling another’s pain. There is an energetic exchange that occurs whereby, to quote Jung, both personalities are transformed. This is Hegel’s dialectic in action and empathy is the willingness to allow it to happen. It is what brings us closer to spirit. There is no true development without empathy. A lack of empathy therefore is synonymous with evil – an unwillingness to meet and transform with what there is, but rather to attempt to bend everything – others, the world and spirit itself – to one’s particular, alienated self. Empathy is never unethical, and a lack of empathy is never ethical.
“…it is not those who suffer that are weak but those who fear suffering.”
– Arno Gruen, The Betrayal of the Self
How often do you hear the word ‘empathy’ being used in the context of shadow work? Encounter something unwholesome in the world and it’s often just assumed that it’s a ‘projection’ of some kind. And such a postulation is true and useful to an extent. There is projection involved. But assuming this truth one-sidedly will lead to the mother of all shadows and a guaranteed encounter with absolute evil itself. That’s what it will take to wake you up out of this view. Another irony here of course is that the one-sided view that everything’s a projection is itself a projection, and a particularly pernicious one – an attempt at gaining power like any other – power over oneself, one’s feelings, other people, and the uncertainty of the unconscious itself. And like all other solicitations to power it too must necessarily give rise to its own opposite.
Empathy and projection are somewhat synonymous too. As Tsarion recently pointed out on Unslaved Podcast episode 341, take away your ‘projections’ and you take away your empathy. Cease being willing to meet yourself in the world and you take away all capacity for meaningful transformation, to be necessarily replaced by ever more elaborate pretence, avoidance and evil. Because something must placate the dissonance that ensues. The primary difference between these terms is in the connotation and the kinds of engagement this involves, not least the intention behind it.
We must all necessarily render our experience in terms of what we know. This is natural and to be expected. But there’s all the difference in the world in whether one approaches life with responsibility and curiosity into themselves and with empathy, or whether they wilfully deny to engage in the great unfolding on which their own existence is based, wilfully reverting to ‘projections’ as a means to deflect from their necessary imperfection. Such people not only want to feel like God while simultaneously denying the very world necessary for God’s becoming, they want to be God. In the literature this is spuriously classed as ‘defence mechanism,’ but it would be more accurate to describe it as offence mechanism, because anyone adopting this attitude to life can only see others as tools to be used in their endless pursuit of self-avoidance. Indeed they are communicating this fact to you constantly – with their words, tone, insinuations, body language and presentation – if only you are willing to hear it – “become a character in my script, or become a target.”
Needless to say someone who has destroyed their capacity for empathy in this way is not a candidate for any kind of meaningful shadow work. You will meet many of them in shadow work and ‘spiritual’ communities for precisely these reasons. And without a grounded understanding of empathy and evil, so pervasively lacking today, you will not be able to tell the difference. Which also goes some way to explaining why shadow work communities so hopelessly hold to the idea that you might heroically ‘help’ someone through shadow work while they are defending and ‘projecting’ in the negative sense. And simultaneously lumping anyone who is genuinely pursuing self-knowledge into the same pot; despite engaging honestly in empathic encounter with the world around them, and setting boundaries against genuine impositions on their freedom, as though selfhood was to be obtained by unquestionably yielding to the will of others. Again there is plenty of talk of ‘shadow,’ ‘projection’ and ‘withdrawal,’ and virtually no discussion of ‘belief,’ ‘experience’ and ‘empathy.’
In other words it is possible to ‘project’ with both wholesome intentions and unwholesome intentions. But let’s not forget also it is most common to project not only dark qualities onto others, but wholesome qualities too.
“Our hero-worshiping capacity is pure shadow; in this case our finest qualities are refused and laid on another. It is hard to understand, but we often refuse to bear our noble traits and instead find a shadow substitute for them…Development generally takes this means of introducing the next stage of its progress. Today’s hero is tomorrow’s character.”
– Robert Johnson, Owning Your Shadow
And beyond simply ‘seeing our unconscious selves in the world,’ we can also see what we do know and understand clearly. There is a kind of ‘projection’ in consciously recognising something we understand very well. Contrary to what is often taught, often it is because you do know and understand something you see in the world that is the reason you notice it, not because you don’t know and understand it.
We don’t have to look very hard for evidence calling the standard narrative around projection into question. Most of us don’t have the luxury of having been alive during WW2. And yet it doesn’t require much imagination to conceive of how quickly common assumptions of shadow work fall down in light of its most basic and widely known facts. Jung himself wrote about it extensively and spoke about it bluntly in a video interview, describing Hitler as an archetypal “Hero figure.”
Are we too to presume that Hitler was more or less OK? – it wasn’t until ignorant people began judging him that he turned bad? Or even more absurd – that he didn’t do anything evil, it was just other people’s projections? Discriminations by the ego? And likewise was it solely people’s unconsciousness of their own evil that led to these events (like those almost unfathomably rendering Jung’s comments as evidence of him being a Hitler supporter)? Or of their own goodness, choosing instead to project that out onto this figure? What’s the difference?
Marie-Louise Von Franz, one of Jung’s closest collaborators corroborates this point in her book The Interpretation of Fairy Tales:
“If one knows about the evil possibilities within oneself then one develops a kind of second sight or capacity for getting a whiff of the same thing in other people…to go down into the depths of one’s own evil enables one usually to develop the instinctual recognition of corresponding elements in other people.”
So clearly what is often judged as ‘projection’ is just one variant of a wide range of possibilities for encountering oneself in the world. Not only can we see apparent goodness (when it isn’t what it purports to be), but we can also do so with conscious recognition, not merely through unconscious arising. And that all of this can be done with both wholesome, self-knowledge-driven intentions, and unwholesome, unempathic, evil, self-avoidant intentions. Thus giving rise to not just one but eight different ‘kinds’ of ‘projection.’ And clearly if someone is projecting without wholesome intentions or empathy, then there is simply no point in entertaining their apparent desire for ‘shadow work,’ because it isn’t really self-knowledge that’s driving them. Whereas if one is encountering the world in a meaningful way with a willingness to reconcile, then it isn’t really appropriate to label it ‘defence’ or ‘projection’ in the unwholesome sense.
Everything in our lives and minds must unfold according to a dialectical process. This would just be the natural unfolding of mind – the only way we can come about. Mind must unfold in a series of steps. For it not to do this would be a contradiction. Because how can anything become without the necessary conditions for it to become?
When you walk across a room or down the street, do you not put your right foot forward while leaving your left one behind? Would it be accurate to call this engagement of one foot at a time a ‘defence mechanism’? Would it be reasonable to expect to get to the other side using only your right foot? And have you done anything ‘wrong’ in subsequently engaging the other one?
Here we reach another common point of confusion, which stems in part from the undefined nature of evil. Often we hear the shadow being equated with evil, or the unconscious itself. But in another context we hear that the shadow contains goodness. Rarely do we hear what goodness and badness are supposed to mean in such contexts, nor grounded in anything outside of the egocentric preferences one is ostensibly trying to transcend. Most typically ‘badness’ is equated with ‘destructive’ tendencies. The Thanatos or death drive, deriving from Freudian psychology in common understanding seems to imply this. A cursory look at the great mystic Jacob Böhme could seem to imply this, until you realise he described that God himself has a destructive side. But is God not good? And is the desire to maintain and preserve the outmoded at any cost not the hallmark of the greatest evils? Thus it must be true that Eros has a dark side and Thanatos has a light side, depending on what they are serving and the intention with which they are applied. Are they resonating with wholeness, serving spirit, or with the alienated self’s desire to be absolute? Wherever there is Eros there will be a corresponding Thanatos and vice versa, irrespective of its intention and what it’s serving. Nothing is one-sided at its essence and again we’re seeing the need to dance with duality at every level. And yet there is a meaningful presence of evil in our world brought about largely by the belief that there isn’t, or the refusal to see that there is.
“As long as Evil is μὴ ὄν (non-being), nobody will take his own shadow seriously. Hitler and Stalin go on representing a mere “accidental lack of perfection.” The future of mankind very much depends upon the recognition of the shadow. Evil is—psychologically speaking—terribly real. It is a fatal mistake to diminish its power and reality even merely metaphysically.”
– Jung, Letter to Father Victor White, 31st December 1949
Jung’s own descriptions of shadow evolved throughout his career. The very term implies an absence of light. But as his own life unfolded, his own encounters with evil, inner and outer, and witnessing the atrocities of the 20th century, he could no longer be satisfied with, at least, evil as the mere ‘privation of good,’ but an active, malevolent force in existence. His portentous ‘Answer to Job’ is a gruelling account, unfolding in real time, of one man’s struggle in coming to terms with the facts of evil, being both necessary and simultaneously unjustifiable.
Jung’s thoughts on energy in the psyche, describing the psyche as an energetic system, seem to support this idea of the shadow as something more dynamic, and help us arrive at a clearer view of what the shadow actually is and how it comes about (see On Psychic Energy, 1928). In this way too Jung seems to have more in common with Hegel and the other idealists than meets the eye.
But throughout his career Jung laboured to remind us that, in short, duality itself is dual. Goodness contains and implies evil, evil contains and implies goodness.
“…yet the shadow belongs to the light as the evil belongs to the good, and vice versa.”
– Jung, Problems of Modern Psychotherapy, in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933)
“Every good quality has its bad side, and nothing that is good can come into the world without directly producing a corresponding evil.”
– Jung, The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man, in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933)
“…the shadow is on one side regrettable and reprehensible weakness, on the other side healthy instinctivity and the prerequisite for higher consciousness.”
– Jung, Aion, 1951
When we think of the mind as an energetic system – operating much like physical phenomena and subject to the same principles – the concept of shadow work begins to make a lot more sense.
“Since psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another and ultimately rest on irrepresentable, transcendental factors, it is not only possible but fairly probable, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing.”
– Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, 1952
And why would it not comply with the same principles? Ultimately it boils down to the same fundamentals on which idealism is built, namely of ultimate non-contradiction. Results in the mind must be brought about through necessity. What we call ‘energy’ can be explained as the phenomena of things needing to remain non-contradictory at essence.
Thus we can explain the existence of a ‘shadow.’ The shadow is simply the energetic opposite – that which must necessarily arise out of the movement of becoming. In this sense everything has a ‘shadow’: The sun has a shadow; mass has a shadow; your daily routine has a shadow; consuming chocolate cake has a shadow. But when psychologists talk about ‘the Shadow,’ if they are doing so accurately, they are referring to this necessary force of negation as it must play out in our development over the macro arc of our lives. In this sense the shadow has both a cause and a teleology, leading us back to alignment and freedom to be who we are implicitly.
All negation must occur as a consequence of the bifurcating nature of the self-knowing mind. Because nothing other than what is absolute can exist permanently. Everything therefore must encounter its own self-generated negation. What is often misunderstood is that the negation comes from one’s own self-contradiction, not from external circumstances per se. This misunderstanding, wilfully or otherwise, has led to all kinds of bastardisations and misapplications of the idealists’ work, such as Marxism and dialectical materialism.
One way to understand internally-generated negation is simply to imagine stretching any quality to its extreme – say ‘kindness’ or ‘efficiency’ – two apparent opposites. You could even say they are the ‘shadow’ of each other.
First, imagine the mere image or idea of ‘kindness’ maxed out, at any cost – it diverges from true kindness to the point of its unwholesomeness becoming undeniable. Likewise take raw ‘efficiency’ to its extreme and the same applies – extreme efficiency isn’t efficiency. Each idea contains their own contradiction due to being split off from the whole, mere partial snapshots. Yet at the same time each contains the very thing needed for the other to be what it purports to be. Kindness without efficiency isn’t true kindness. Efficiency without kindness isn’t true efficiency. True kindness is efficient. True efficiency is kind. Furthermore, devouring, false ‘kindness’ is always beaten by true efficiency, and ruthless, self-serving ‘efficiency’ is always defeated by true kindness. Each negates the other’s negation and with it sublates into something higher.
This tendency of things at their extremes to become their opposites has a name, that is ‘enantiodromia’ – literally meaning “running to the opposite.” It was coined originally by Heraclitus and revived and used many times by Jung in his writing. It is an important concept to understand in the pursuit of shadow work.
But the development of a personality is not a case of the neutralisation of opposites or reverting back to zero, as noted above. It is alchemy – the sublation of opposing forces into higher order truth. A dialectic in the Hegelian sense, where what emerges is a previously unimagined synthesis that reconciles the deeper truths of what came before. This is how the ‘true’ kindness and ‘true’ efficiency mentioned above come about. This is how anything new comes into existence out of its implicate order, including you as a self.
The aim of shadow work therefore is not to simply stop showing up the way you’ve been showing up. Neither is it to wholly embrace everything you see in the shadow which must contain some dark and evil aspects. It is to recognise that both these positions exist and for good reason. Both contain both light and dark qualities; both serve a purpose; both can be vehicles and both can be traps; both contain truth and; both contain falsity – born out of a need to serve a mere moment in time, but also through its wilful misuse.
Literal shadow, the absence of light, does not become its opposite. However energetic contradictions do. Given this is a matter of energy and resolving contradiction, other concepts that apply to energy and energetic phenomena also apply to the mind.
“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.”
– Nikola Tesla
One of the primary confusions around shadow and shadow work lies in a non-differentiation of this concoction of factors i.e.: Quality – preferences, traits and behaviours; Quantity – or the energy or magnitude with which they are expressed, and; Direction – the intention with which they are applied. Much thinking on the subject tends to conflate the three in some way – foremost by portraying certain traits as good or evil unto themselves; secondly by conflating the magnitude of energy with qualities in themselves; and lastly by regarding abuses of power as a sort of trait in itself, when actually any trait can be used in service of power and the violation of freedom.
Of course there is some truth in all three of these variants of misunderstanding, on account of the discriminating function of mind. Quantity does have a kind of quality of its own. So does evil. And these discriminations are precisely why the shadow turns up in the kinds of ways and forms that it does, and why our inability to discern between them leads to the very negations we are called to resolve. This is also why all our encounters with the shadow derive fundamentally from our desire for ‘good,’ to be good, to be close to goodness, to be whole, as well as our simultaneous desire to be away from those things which remind us of our necessary partiality. Even the most egregious machinators of evil are caught up in this conflict, out of a desire for at least some semblance of wholeness. When the resistance to the self is so strong, and one’s lived experience so misaligned from the essence it craves, even the most preposterous, cartoon version of it can seem to suffice in placating the tension, at least temporarily.
It is for these reasons why the desire for power, in whatever flavour, is so often caught up with the discussion of shadow. So much so that power is often conflated for shadow and vice versa. Often when people speak of shadow, they are more accurately speaking of power. But what I am proposing is that these are best regarded as opposites. And yet like any pair of opposites they share an underlying unity. It’s that enantiodromia again. Power contains a kind of shadow. Shadow contains a kind of power. Power and shadow turn up as discriminate points on opposing energy pathways, that exist both in isolation as traits and in dynamic relation to everything else. The primary difference is that power at least aligns to something conscious, whereas shadow is unconscious by definition.
Wherever someone is serving power, the shadow will be right there along with it. But it will be rendered in such a way that it appears to be serving one’s conscious thesis. Invariably the means people use to exert power do not ‘look like’ power. Not at first. The kind person can always say their kindness is being done for the other person, which is precisely what makes it such a tantalising ruse. The efficient person’s justification is no less convincing, for what is more noble than producing ‘results’ for the good of the world, self and others? Power is essentially the means by which one copes with the energetic disagreement with the unconscious, including one’s personal complexes, the archetypes that underpin them and the unknown in the widest sense. Shadow, in this sense, is the very notion that there might be anything not entirely wholesome in one’s current approach and attitude to life.
Leading Jungian analyst James Hollis describes the functional definition of the shadow as “that which renders us uncomfortable in confronting in ourselves.” If someone is showing up with an excess of their primary thesis or dominant cognitive function, is it accurate to describe this as ‘shadow?’ Perhaps. But what about us exactly is ‘difficult to confront’ in such situations? And on whom are we to rely to arbitrate what is excessive? Such conflations can and do lead to all kinds of diversions where the individual never truly understands what is ‘in their shadow’ and never acquires the kind of self-knowledge that they could acquire. It leads to a spurious discussion of opposites that does not truthfully apply in the way they are being discussed, because the proper delineations have not been made by neither the coach/therapist nor their client. Directions are confused with qualities, magnitudes with directions, and the underlying energies themselves are mis-classified as things they are not. As a result it can take many more years, even decades, for the individual to truly get to the heart of what is in their shadow, if they ever do.
My own confrontation with these various contradictions, and study of the various thinkers discussed, led me to conceive of the Shadow Map model. I sought to produce a model that captured the dual nature of the dialectic, the light and dark forms of either side, its energetic nature, magnitude as well as quality, the possibility for synthesis, the nature of freedom and power, the mechanics of shadow and projection, and an understanding of the role and mechanisms of evil. It needed to consider how things unfold through three dimensions of opposites – primary duality, traits and intention – plus the centrum where all of these forces must reconcile. While the Shadow Map can be applied at many layers of complexity, it is fundamentally very simple, and can be understood by anyone at a basic level. That’s its point, as it is an attempt to reconcile disparate ideas from philosophy, psychology, spiritual traditions and everyday life.
I put it forward on the basis that neither it nor the words about it are the point. The Shadow Map is a model for understanding and engaging with yourself. It doubles up as a living lemniscate and transformation tool, that can be engaged with symbolically, as much as it is an intellectual device for mapping out actual elements of personality on paper.
The basic premises are: firstly that you and everything else are dual, and must manifest as dual and partial; secondly that existence and the mind are energetic, and must behave in a compensatory manner due to their essential non-contradiction; and lastly that the model serves as a pathway to wholeness – not ‘oneness,’ but reconciliation with this ultimate non-contradictoriness, towards greater freedom and realisation of your essence.
As a practical rule, each of us tends to operate with a small number of primary Conscious Theses, inbuilt from the start, that must play out over the course of our lives and be integrated if we are to live out our potential. These might show up represented by our dominant and auxiliary functions in Myers-Briggs or Jungian Personality Type terms. Symbolically they can show up in our Tarot Birth Chart or traditional astrological charts. They are how we tend to see and present ourselves, including our personae, and particularly those behaviours we perform effortlessly, proficiently, or especially value in ourselves.
Perhaps you see yourself as very kind, and that is likely true and a valuable asset. But what is really at the heart of that? Again Jung’s Theory of Type, as well as symbolic representations such as those found in the major arcana of the tarot, provide some of the purest means of thinking about the energies that can show up in this section of your Shadow Map. Again the purpose is not merely to pin it down in words, since that is impossible, but to access and engage with the underlying movement that this represents. All the while we are developing whole-brain awareness leading to a deep, felt understanding of the self.
This conscious leaning however necessarily brings with it its own dark side, connected to the Conscious Thesis by the fact its the same energy – the same flavour – just used excessively, out of balance, or applied in a different way. This is where power comes in. Invariably the ways we consciously show up are also the ways in which we serve power. The Power Position again can be thought of as a point on this pathway – necessary to an extent, but also by definition not a whole unto itself, representative of a partial truth. Keeping again to the example of ‘kindness,’ the Power Position here might represent something like an unhealthy ‘selflessness.’
“Power?” I hear you ask. Certainly, extreme selflessness can be a perfect exercise in power – power over one’s own feelings, one’s own need to empathically engage with opposition, and everything else that derives from this.
This kind of power is one-sided and must necessarily set up something else in experience. It is both self-negating (because how can you ever hope to help others without helping yourself?) and it sets up an opposite in the form of the Shadow Position. The Shadow Position is the direct opposite of the Power Position and precisely the thing that appears left out by it. It shows up to demonstrate exactly what is missing from the Conscious Thesis in its attempts to realise wholeness. It may have remained apparently dormant forever until a certain point, where the Thesis and the Shadow have co-existed, undivided in relative harmony, but eventually and under new developing conditions, whatever is left out must become not only misaligned but directly opposing. The Shadow in this example could also take many words, but likely something along the lines of ‘malign selfishness.’
At these extremes, the Shadow must appear threatening and oppositional, since it is both necessary and resisted. Just as the Power Position is unwholesome (in the sense of being not-whole), so must be the Shadow. I have already discussed how power and shadow share an underlying unity, except that one is consciously identified with, whereas the other meets with the very same energy in the form of resistance. They share this one-sidedness. Again, to illustrate the enantiodromia – extreme selfishness is in fact entirely unconducive to self, while total selflessness is also totally selfish.
However just as the Power Position derives from something ultimately not evil in itself, so does the shadow. There are wholesome aspects to the shadow just as there are to the Conscious Thesis. These wholesome aspects of the shadow are precisely what are needed in order to reconcile and reach a higher order synthesis. This is how all meaningful progress happens. I have termed this light and wholesome part of the ‘shadow’ as the Antithesis or Counterpart.
(This is slightly different from how the word is used in discussions of Hegelian philosophy, where the terms ‘negation’ and ‘antithesis’ are often used interchangeably. Negation in this model is the self-generated aspect, differentiated from Shadow and Antithesis which are the opposing aspects, although again they are entantiodromic and share a common source.)
In our example, the Antithesis might be represented by something like ‘legitimate self-care.’ This is initially very difficult for someone whose Conscious Thesis is an image of ‘kindness,’ in whatever form that may take. Attempting to go anywhere near the image of ‘selfishness,’ and simultaneously loosen their grip on their initial idea of ‘kindness,’ can be terrifying or even feel like a matter of life or death. But this is where the real work is done, through this energetic exchange. It is simultaneously a breaking down of old models, a healthy use of Thanatos, and the willingness to reconcile with the opposite.
There may be a temptation from the materialist camp to judge such resistances as irrational from the get-go, but arguably nothing is more rational than taking stock of the energetic nature of the mind, including its conscious and unconscious dynamics, and nothing more irrational than denying these necessary premises. The energetic facts of mind are no less real than steel pipes and lego bricks; a reality that anyone who’s ever pursued any meaningful shadow work can attest to, and another reason for the vital importance of empathy in shadow work.
The initial Thesis of ‘kindness’ formed for good reason. It was the vehicle that carried the individual through the first encounter with the unknown. What happens when its opposite is assimilated however is where things get really interesting. Because what falls away is not the kindness as one might have initially feared. The initial movement toward kindness, or whatever the Thesis was, was sound. Instead the opposing tendency is synthesised with it in order to produce a higher order version of what was initially postulated. Being unafraid to be seen as unkind, one can actually become more kind. By practicing legitimate self-care, one can genuinely provide care for others. Not least because they keep themselves in check, but because they are of a whole order of magnitude more capable of discerning what another person actually needs, rather than what they merely want to give in gratifying their own pre-existing Thesis. No longer are they merely acting from a place of needing to be seen as kind, and placating the resistance and inexorable pull of transformation.
This does not mean that everyone will necessarily perceive someone doing shadow work as being kind. Far from it. Because others are themselves seeing their actions through the lens of their own partiality, but also because being truly kind always requires that one confronts their fear of being seen as unkind. It is an energetic necessity that they will come up against such judgements in order to truly realise their thesis in essence. (Neither does it mean, sad as it is to have to say, that if people do perceive you as unkind that they are necessarily mistaken.)
The Synthesis (or Sublation) is something much harder to understand or meaningfully lay down in words than the Thesis and Antithesis. It is an additional degree of separation from one’s initial concepts. It would be better described as a way of being. A higher order version of the Thesis but one that does not violate its opposite and exists in healthy relationship to it, enabling it to carry out its true Thesis all the better. The ultimate idea of yourself is too a synthesis, where nothing in you contradicts itself, and you are free to be exactly what you are implicitly.
Most of our concepts and the movement of ideas are captured in this synthetic way. As discussed earlier, Jungian psychology is one attempt to harmonise the virtues of spirituality and rational thought, but it isn’t the only one. Western mysticism too can be construed as an attempt at transcending these opposites. The model of Spiral Dynamics is another useful attempt at mapping the development of consciousness through developing, contradictory stages. By no coincidence it too features three pairs of opposites, to be transcended and included in the next ‘Tier’ or octave above.
I find the Shadow Map model provides a neat and useful way to clearly and precisely map out the dynamics playing out in your personality. Once a Conscious Thesis is identified, you can quickly deduce what lies in the Power Position, Shadow Position and Antithesis. You can also start from any other part of the dynamic and deduce the rest from there, for instance by reflecting on where and how you serve power and what good it contains, or in what exactly it is you resist in others and what benefits lie in the same energy.
At the same time, it encourages you to think critically about where exactly each of these forces sits, and how they relate, in terms of Quality, Quantity and Direction, taking care not to gaslight yourself into thinking that your problem is one thing when really it’s another.
The model itself operates as a symbol of this dialectical process. Working with it can facilitate transformation simply by opening you up to and visualising the opposites in play, helping you become familiar with their energetic nature. Beyond that, It also points to pathways to development, outlining what needs to be confronted and what gold it might contain. Combined with the Seven Habits of Individuation model and practices like active imagination, it can help pinpoint exactly the kinds of actions and exercises you can focus on to transmute inner and outer conflict into greater freedom and expression.
Just as it can be applied to individuals, it can be applied to teams, organisations societies and ideas of all kinds, helping to understand their wholesome and negative aspects, where they contradict, what they must come up against for further development, and what they can actually do to facilitate and navigate this alchemical work.
It can be used as a thinking tool – a map of psychic conflict representing the ‘duality of duality.’ It can help elucidate what exactly is unfolding consciously and unconsciously, why its arising and what a resolution might involve. It provides a means of thinking about personal matters like addiction, codependency and forgiveness, to broader matters like organisational development, culture, economics and politics. It can help you reach clarity and decisions around these matters which by default have no clear solution.
So far I have left out one important aspect of this whole model, and that is where the concept of evil fits in. Just a small detail then…
We should note that it is not only the central point – the Self – that is being circumambulated. Just as the planets go around the sun, moons orbit the planets. The compensatory centrifugal and centripetal forces of Eros and Thanatos are operating at all scales. Even the initial movement out to the Thesis of ‘kindness’ features a kind of circumambulation of its own, around this very thesis and point – it isn’t a one-time event, but something that is practiced, honed and adapted to over time; figuring out ‘what works,’ as it were. This initial movement out, while Eros-based from the perspective of the self attempting to discover itself, by itself includes countless moments of creation and destruction as it goes. It moves towards ‘what works’ based on the ego’s pre-existing understanding of what it needs. And that is perfectly legitimate. It does need to establish itself, and find a way to navigate the unruly forces and ever present threat of the unknown. The Thesis is established precisely to navigate in the unknown. It is only later when the dark side of that Thesis is thoroughly felt, that one can meaningfully consider the whole other side of the equation. At which point it becomes necessary to re-define what one means by ‘works.’
The freedom to become who we are implicitly through this process is both the greatest gift and simultaneously the cause of all evil because, as Schelling showed, if you are free to become the Self then you are free to deny the Self. There are all kinds of reasons why one might choose to do evil, but ultimately they boil down to a wilful violation of the Self.
The development of self-knowledge must always be a difficult process. For some the work involved, partly conditioned by their own trauma and experience, but also by their own choice, fear and laziness, leads them to choose to deny this journey. But because it is ultimately about becoming less contradictory, there is also the ‘journey’ of perpetually resisting inner dialectic at any cost.
For some the perceived effort and pain involved in developing self-knowledge is anticipated to be worse than death. Naturally for many of them they had good reason to believe that their early childhood experiences were a matter of life or death. But very quickly they adapted by developing a false self that seemed precisely what was needed to protect them from the unknown, threats perceived or real. Then through an accumulation of poor choices over time, the early experience that could have been transmuted into freedom, actualises instead as a brutal inner tyranny.
A narcissist, in psychospiritual terms, is someone who has decided to never ever engage in any empathic transformation with themselves or the world no matter what. Their Number One value in life is their alienated self and nothing else is tenable. The prospect of even a hint of confrontation with themselves is enough to send them into a rage. They will fight to the death over this precisely because they value the self-image more than life itself and the opportunity of life. Understandable, but not justifiable. Thus they serve power and power alone, but unable to escape the laws of compensation and final non-contradiction on which their ultimate free will depends, they present with the most incongruent dissonance.
“Thus is the beginning of sin, that man transgresses from authentic Being into non-Being, from truth into lies, from the light into darkness, in order to become a self-creating ground and, with the power of the centrum which he has within himself, to rule over all things. For the feeling still remains in the one having strayed from the centrum that he was all things, namely, in and with God; for that reason he strives once again to return there, but for himself, and not where he might be all things, namely, in God.”
– Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries into the Essence of Human Freedom, 1809
I call this phenomenon the Dissonance Loop.
That’s not to say that all people can’t get stuck in some kind of dissonance at multiple points in our lives. This goes beyond merely serving power, and becomes an insistence on the idea of self at any cost. This is where a person ‘serves evil.’
It is dissonant because it is marked by persistent and flagrant self-contradiction at all levels. It feels the tension born out of the widening chasm between its existence and its essence, but convinces itself that the solution is to paste over it with expedient illusions, producing not a reconciliation of opposites but a superficial, uncanny valley-like effect that leaves you feeling empty. Its hallmarks are inflation, possession, master-slave dynamics, negative projections, elaborate and sophisticated defences, grandiose compensations and the most ironic outbursts the moment it is questioned. It ‘says’ all the right things while communicating something quite different. It is secretly at war with itself but must project it outwards. Like Schrödingers conman, it flips one way when it suits it and flops the other way when it doesn’t; its erratic behaviour unified only by its secret, insatiable lust for power and flawless self-image. At all levels it must convince itself that it is good and right, because it is concerned entirely with image over substance, and must depend on the perpetual extraction of others’ own inner content to uphold its facade.
It is a loop because it must still circumambulate and be in motion. It is still engaging in some degree of reaching out and coming back, attempting to orbit not spirit and selfhood, but the mere self-image and alienated self. “Egocentric,” in the negative sense, is not a bad word to describe it. Conflating its self-image for the Self, it postulates somewhat useful half-truths with the loftiness suggestive of a whole. It engages in Eros and Thanatos, but only insofar as they serve the alienated self alone. It will happily reach out to what it craves in support of its image, and it will not hesitate to destroy that which it perceives as a threat to the same. It can certainly be reflective. Just not self-reflective.
Needless to say, it thinks it values its own freedom; it just doesn’t value your freedom. Its resistance to transformation is ultimately futile because it’s in violation of the very thing it needs in order to be. Attempting to bend the Absolute to its own particulars, it wants to live in a universe that could not exist. The inflated ego, in Jung’s words, “dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead.”
This mechanism gives rise to all the common forms of abuse we see and experience in the world today, on an individual scale in the narcissistic variety, codependency and related behaviours such as gaslighting; on an organisational scale such as in cancel culture, bullying, exploitation by employers and authoritarian cults of all kinds; and on a societal scale in the deception, manipulation and power-play that occurs between and within nations.
Coming to terms with evil as it exists in the world is a core component of shadow work and is why I refer to it as Outer Shadow Work. Far from needing to explain away evil as the result of ‘difficult upbringings’ or, worse, ‘just your own projection’ – these dynamics, which leave most people today confounded, can be clearly explained with the help of thinkers like Böhme, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Jung and others of their ilk.
As has been shown, the belief that such Outer Shadow Work need not be done, or that it is ‘all you’ or something equivalent, itself sets up a shadow dialectic that needs to be worked through. On some level the belief that evil doesn’t exist, or shouldn’t exist, or simply shouldn’t be looked at, is what brings about its reality. It’s a reality that can only get worse until we examine it, both internally and externally, and that means understanding its reasons, its arising, its mechanics and its constituent parts.
Just as any dialectic in yourself can be synthesised into something higher, in a curious twist, existence itself is made better by the presence and assimilation of evil. That is the ultimate reason for it. It’s not a justification, because evil is by definition a ‘bad’ and undesirable reality. Evil is the price we pay for freedom, and true self-knowledge is a far higher value than a world where evil is impossible. It is counter-intuitively the pursuit of self-knowledge itself that will lead to the abolishment of evil.
The pursuit of self-knowledge remains the fundamental task. Not as a bolt-on to an otherwise materialist or achievist pursuit of what we’ve already deemed as right, but with the empathy and willingness to engage with the deeper parts of ourselves, confront our necessary opposites, and recognise our roles as the locus point where both sides come together.
The Shadow Map is a framework that attempts not only to parse out and explain many of the conceptual sticking points of shadow work and the development of self-knowledge, but also serves as a useful method for mapping the shadow in a way that leads to meaningful, transformative work.
As Jung, Hegel, Schelling and others have recognised, this work isn’t just a personal endeavour but our natural calling in the wider unfolding towards greater consciousness and freedom.
