In Shadow Work®, we heed the warnings of resistances by speaking with their representative, the Risk Manager.

"The spirit does not dwell in concepts, but in deeds and in facts. Words butter no parsnips..." (p.144)

"Words butter no parsnips" would make a great quote for a plaque if it weren't that most Americans no longer remember what parsnips are.

"One thing was clear: Freud, who had always made much of his irreligiosity, had now constructed a dogma; or rather, in the place of a jealous God whom he had lost, he had substituted another compelling image, that of sexuality. It was no less insistent, exacting, domineering, threatening, and morally ambivalent than the original one." (p.151)

A description of the wound addressed by a Shadow Work process called the God-split, in which we elicit the "god" by which a person has been living painfully and help them substitute for it a "real" god that will allow them to live abundantly.

"The idea dawned on me that Eros and the power drive might be in a sense like the dissident sons of a single father, or the products of a single motivating psychic force which manifested itself empirically in opposing forms, like positive and negative electrical charges... Where is the one drive without the other? On the one hand man succumbs to the drive; on the other hand, he tries to master it." (p.153)

In the Shadow Work® four-quarter model, the tension between Magician and Lover.

"It may well be said that the contemporary cultural consciousness has not yet absorbed into its general philosophy the idea of the unconscious and all that it means, despite the fact that modern man has been confronted with this idea for more than half a century. The assimilation of the fundamental insight that psychic life has two poles still remains a task for the future." (p.169)

More than 40 years later, the same is still true.

"In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me "underground," I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them, as it were. I felt not only violent resistance to this, but a distinct fear. For I was afraid of losing command of myself and becoming a prey to the fantasies - and as a psychiatrist I realized only too well what that meant. After prolonged hesitation, however, I saw that there was no other way out. I had to take the chance, had to try to gain power over them; for I realized that if I did not do so, I ran the risk of their gaining power over me. A cogent motive for my making the attempt was the conviction that I could not expect of my patients something I did not dare to do myself." (p.178)

Jung's intention in undergoing for five years what came to be called his "descent into the unconscious."

"It was then that I ceased to belong to myself alone, ceased to have the right to do so. ... I myself had to undergo the original experience, and, moreover, try to plant the results of my experience in the soil of reality; otherwise they would have remained subjective assumptions without validity. It was then that I dedicated myself to service of the psyche. I loved it and hated it, but it was my greatest wealth. My delivering myself over to it, as it were, was the only way by which I could endure my existence and live it as fully as possible." (p.192)

"I took great care to try to understand every single image, every item of my psychic inventory, and to classify them scientifically-so far as this was possible-and, above all, to realize them in actual life. That is what we usually neglect to do. We allow the images to rise up, and maybe we wonder about them, but that is all. ... The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life." (pp.192, 193)

Following through on inspiration becomes a moral imperative. I find that this concept helps me to realize my artistic ideas.

"The book on types yielded the insight that every judgment made by an individual is conditioned by his personality type and that every point of view is necessarily relative." (p.207)

Proof, of a sort, for relativism.

"Only after I had familiarized myself with alchemy did I realize that the unconscious is a process, and that the psyche is transformed or developed by the relationship of the ego to the contents of the unconscious." (p.209)

"Blind acceptance never leads to a solution; at best it leads only to a standstill and is paid for heavily in the next generation." (p.215)

"I really ought to say a great deal more, or a great deal less. It is an improvisation, like everything I am relating here. It is born of the moment. ... The work is the expression of my inner development; for commitment to the contents of the unconscious forms the man and produces his transformations. My works can be regarded as stations along my life's way." (pp.221-222)

Jung's answer to the frustration of his biographers over his seeming inconsistency.

"All my writings may be considered tasks imposed from within; their source was a fateful compulsion. ... I have never counted upon any strong response, any powerful resonance, to my writings. ... I have been impelled to say what no one wants to hear. For that reason, and especially at the beginning, I often felt utterly forlorn. I knew that what I said would be unwelcome, for it is difficult for people of our times to accept the counterweight to the conscious world." (p.222)

Imagine Jung thinking his words would find no resonance in the world. If even he despaired of having an impact, how much more compassion do we owe ourselves for our own moments of despair?

"I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children." (p.233)

If, as Jung said elsewhere (see page 318 below), each of us is a question asked of life, it makes sense to me that a family's members would be a cluster of similar questions.

"...[T]he future is unconsciously prepared long in advance and therefore can be guessed by clairvoyants." (p.235)

I like to think Jung means that our shadow lays in wait for us, in the forms of accidents, disease and so on, and that there are other fate-ordained events in our future of which our unconscious knows nothing.

"We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness. We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of greater freedom is canceled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us." (p.236)

Nuclear fission reactors expose us to substances that will remain toxic for a quarter of a million years.

"The Arab's dusky complexion marks him as a 'shadow,' but not the personal shadow, rather an ethnic one associated not with my persona but with the totality of my personality, that is, with the self. ... The predominantly rationalistic European finds much that is human alien to him, and he prides himself on this without realizing that his rationality is won at the expense of his vitality, and that the primitive part of his personality is consequently condemned to a more or less underground existence." (p.245)

I am reminded of Rudolf Valentino, whose sultry sensuality in the role of an Arabian sheik so excited women in the 20s that his death reportedly gave rise to a number of suicides.

"In the living psychic structure, nothing takes place in a merely mechanical fashion; everything fits into the economy of the whole, relates to the whole. That is to say, it is all purposeful and has meaning. But because consciousness never has a view of the whole, it usually cannot understand this meaning." (p.246)

"Out of sheer envy we are obliged to smile at the Indians' naivete and to plume ourselves on our cleverness; for otherwise we would discover how impoverished and down at the heels we are. Knowledge does not enrich us; it removes us more and more from the mythic world in which we were once at home by right of birth." (p.252)

What a loss to American culture, that we have not integrated these aboriginal mythologies.

"What happens within oneself when one integrates previously unconscious contents with the consciousness is something which can scarcely be described in words. It can only be experienced." (p.287)

"For it seemed to me as if behind the horizon of the cosmos a three-dimensional world had been artificially built up, in which each person sat by himself in a little box. And now I should have to convince myself all over again that this was important! ... Although my belief in the world returned to me, I have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that this life is a segment of existence which is enacted in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up for it." (pp.292,295)

Jung's near-death experience during a severe illness paints an inspiring picture of life after death as a supremely connected existence.

"But when one follows the path of individuation, when one lives one's own life, one must take mistakes into the bargain; life would not be complete without them. There is no guarantee - not for a single moment - that we will not fall into error or stumble into deadly peril. We may think there is a sure road. But that would be the road of death. Then nothing happens any longer - at any rate, not the right things. Anyone who takes the sure road is as good as dead." (p.297)

"It was only after the illness that I understood how important it is to affirm one's own destiny. In this way we forge an ego that does not break down when incomprehensible things happen; an ego that endures, that endures the truth, and that is capable of coping with the world and with fate." (p.297)

"As a matter of fact, day after day we live far beyond the bounds of our consciousness; without our knowledge, the life of the unconscious is also going on within us. The more the critical reason dominates, the more impoverished life becomes; but the more of the unconscious, and the more of myth we are capable of making conscious, the more of life we integrate. Overvalued reason has this in common with political absolutism: under its dominion the individual is pauperized." (p.302)

"Yet death is an important interest, especially to an aging person. A categorical question is being put to him, and he is under an obligation to answer it. To this end he ought to have a myth about death, for reason show shim nothing but the dark pit into which he is descending. Myth, however, can conjure up other images for him, helpful and enriching pictures of life in the land of the dead. If he believes in them, or greets them with some measure of credence, he is being just as right or just as wrong as someone who does not believe in them. But while the man who despairs marches toward nothingness, the one who has placed his faith in the archetype follows the tracks of life and lives right into his death. Both, to be sure, remain in uncertainty, but the one lives against his instincts, the other with them." (p.306)

"Myth is the natural and indispensable intermediate stage between unconscious and conscious cognition." (p.311)

"In the light of eternity, [death] is a wedding, a mysterium coniunctionis. The soul attains, as it were, its missing half, it achieves wholeness." (p.314)

"The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me. Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to the world, and I must communicate my answer, for otherwise I am dependent upon the world's answer." (p.318)

If I am a question, I suspect I am, "Why?"

"In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted." (p.325)

"We must, therefore, no longer succumb to anything at all, not even to good. A so-called good to which we succumb loses its ethical character. ... In practical terms, this means that good and evil are no longer so self-evident. We have to realize that each represents a judgment. In view of the fallibility of all human judgment, we cannot believe that we will always judge rightly." (p.329)

Any absolute belief places something in shadow - presumably even this one.

"Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche." (p.335)

Fractals, then, apply to the psyche as well as to the natural world.

"That is the meaning of divine service, of the service which man can render to God, that light may emerge from the darkness, that the creator may become conscious of His creation, and man conscious of himself." (p.338)

Perhaps this is the answer Jung would give to the question, What is the meaning of life?

"Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable - perhaps everything. No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science. For it is not that 'God' is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth, rather it speaks to us as a Word of God." (p.340)

And so Native American animal medicine and tarot cards speak to me.

"By no means every conflict of duties, and perhaps not even a single one, is ever really 'solved,' though it may be argued over, weighed, and counterweighed till doomsday. Sooner or later the decision is simply there, the product, it would seem, of some kind of short-circuit. Practical life cannot be suspended in an everlasting contradiction." (pp.345-346)

The psyche will "park" an issue to achieve balance.

"As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know." (p.356)

See also Books and CDs We Recommend, a bibliography of books, CDs and tapes related to personal growth and spirituality, at the Shadow Work® Seminars site.

• List of books.
  
• Tell a friend about this page
• Healing Space home page.