The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [55]
Given the right circumstances, everyone’s shadow energy will emerge.
Let’s focus, then, on the shadow as the area where consciousness has become distorted to the point that evil choices might be made. (Keep in mind the word “might,” since even under the most dehumanized conditions, there are good people who remain good, which is to say that they are able to resist or control the release of their shadow energies.) The famed Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung was the first to use “the shadow” as a clinical term, but here I want to speak in general of the hidden places where we all repress things we feel guilty about or ashamed of. I will call this place the shadow, and I believe there are certain true things to be said about it:
The shadow is personal and universal at the same time.
Anything can be stored there.
Whatever is stored in darkness becomes distorted.
The intensity of shadow energies is a way of getting noticed.
Bringing consciousness to any energy defuses it.
The shadow itself is not evil and therefore not your enemy.
By examining each statement, we get closer to removing the fearful demon we label—almost always in other people—as evil incarnate.
The shadow is personal and universal at the same time: Everyone harbors a unique pattern of shame and guilt. Simple things like nudity, sexual intercourse, anger, and anxiety give rise to enormously complex feelings. In one society, seeing your mother naked could be trivial, while in another it could be such a traumatic experience that it can only be dealt with by shoving it down into the shadow. There is no sharp distinction between personal feelings, family feelings, and social feelings. They blend and weave together. But even if you feel ashamed that you hit a bully on the playground when you were seven, and another person thinks doing the same thing was a valuable moment in developing personal courage, to have a shadow is universal as well as personal. The human psyche was set up with a hiding place, and for most people that place is totally necessary, given the enormous difficulty of facing one’s darkest impulses and deepest humiliations.
Anything can be stored there: A bank vault where you keep your most precious possessions is a hiding place as much as a prison dungeon. The same is true for the shadow. Although the term is used most of the time to describe a hiding place for negative energies, you have the power to turn positive to negative and vice versa. I once knew two sisters who were close as children but grew up as very different adults, the one a successful college professor, the other a twice-divorced worker at a temporary agency. The successful sister describes her childhood as wonderful; the other sister describes hers as traumatic. “Remember when Daddy locked you in the bathroom for six hours after you did something wrong?” I heard the unhappy sister say to her sibling. “That was a turning point for me. I could only imagine how angry and hopeless you felt.”
The happy sister looked very surprised. “Why didn’t you ask me about that? I liked being alone, so I just went inside and told myself imaginary stories. The incident was nothing.” And so our stories go their separate, highly idiosyncratic ways. The same incident had no emotional charge for one sister, whereas it was a source of anger and shame for the other. Great art can be made out of scenes of violence (witness Picasso’s Guernica) and horrors can be concocted from holy virtue (witness the crucifixion of Jesus). In the unconscious, there is a full population of unexamined impulses. The same Stanford student who might debase himself as a sadistic prison guard could also be harboring artistic talent that will never emerge unless the right situation allows the unconscious mind to release what it