Song - Far Away Place, Rampa Remix
Carl Jung, the famous psychoanalyst, wrote about the concept of the unconscious aspect of the psyche that contains our repressed desires, fears, and complexes. Jung argued that the shadow must be acknowledged and integrated in order to achieve psychological wholeness. This requires taking an account of the qualities in others that trigger your ego and that make you feel existentially superior to others. Often these qualities are repressed desires, fears, and complexes we have failed to take responsibility for.
This process, known as Shadow Work, is a very difficult practice that can be physically and intellectually uncomfortable since it entails the searching out of one's motives and the discernment of what is coming from the ego, and what, from the Higher Self — and submitting the former to the latter. Difficult, but also the real and sacred definition of maturity. To do this in a sustainable way, individuals should form communities that center this and other mindfulness trainings as a manner of practice and ritual. This is what I am trying to build through Theory of Enchantment and what I am attempting to practice in my everyday life.
There is precedent for this. The Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s, for example, was not just a fight for civil liberties. In fact, if it had not been underpinned by a spiritual dimension and outlook that included such mindfulness trainings, it likely would have sputtered and died. But the organizers of the CRM understood that the racism that infected their white counterparts could just as easily have infected them. Which is why they trained themselves not to hate their oppressors but to see them as fellow humans made in the image of the divine.
They understood that just because their oppressors were racists didn’t mean they were incapable of being racists themselves. And if they attributed to racism some sort of unique, mysterious, talisman-like evil, as opposed to a rather ubiquitous form of self-deception that any human was capable of slipping into, they would be less likely to defeat it.
Reinhold Neibuhr predicted that the African-American community would do this and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr internalized many of Neibuhr’s observations on the human condition after studying him as a theological student at Boston university.
In Moral Man and Immoral Society Neibuhr notes that the capacity to
“…recognize that the evil in the foe is also in the self, and these impulses of love which claim kinship with all men inspire of social conflict are the peculiar gifts of religion to the human spirit…[and] require a sublime madness which disregards immediate appearances and emphasizes profound and ultimate unities. It is no accident of history that [this] has been introduced into contemporary politics by a religious leader of the orient.”
(That last bit was a reference to Gandhi's mysticism, and eastern metaphysics will be something I’ll explore in later essays.)
He goes on to say that the peace of the world must be gained by strife and so will remain imperfect but “more perfect than it is…if….[humans] do not seek to conquer or eliminate nature but tries only to make the forces of nature the servants of the human spirit and the instruments of the moral ideal.” Only then, he goes on to say, can a more stable peace be achieved.
As above so below. A more stable peace on both the individual level and at the level of society requires giving up the impulse to try to “eliminate nature,” of which evil is a part. Hence the pursuit of the eradication of evil is internally contradictory. To eradicate it would require the eradication of one’s self and the whole world. It is perhaps no surprise, and a warning, that perfectionists often slip into nihilism. It is its logical conclusion, after all.
Small Bite: Song - Far Away Place, Rampa Remix
Big Bite: Moral Man & Immoral Society by Reinhold Niebuhr
Up Next: Stay Tuned…
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