The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [56]
Whatever is stored in darkness becomes distorted: Awareness, like fresh water, is meant to flow, and when it can’t, it turns stagnant. In your inner world, there are countless memories and repressed impulses. You do not allow these to flow, which is to say to be released; therefore, they have no choice but to stagnate. Good impulses die for lack of being acted on. Love grows timid and afraid when not expressed. Hatred and anxiety loom larger than life. It is the primary property of consciousness that it can organize itself into new patterns and designs. If you don’t allow consciousness to go where it needs to, however, disorganized energy is the result. For example, if you ask people to describe how they feel about their parents, a subject that most adults set aside as a thing of the past, you find that their memories from childhood are a confusing jumble. Trivial events stand out as huge traumas; other family members are simplified into cartoons; true feelings are hard or impossible to excavate. Thus, when a disturbed patient comes to a psychiatrist to be healed of a painful childhood wound, it often takes months if not years to separate fact from fantasy.
The intensity of shadow energies is a way of getting noticed: Hiding something is not the same as killing it. Shadow energies remain alive. Even though you refuse to look at them, they aren’t extinguished—in fact, their desire for life becomes all the more desperate. To catch your attention as a parent, a child who is overlooked will become more and more extreme in its behavior: first a call for attention, then a cry, then a tantrum. Shadow energies follow much the same pattern. It seems only reasonable to see panic attacks, for example, as a hidden fear throwing a tantrum. That same fear first called out to be noticed in a normal way, but when the person refused to notice it, a call turned into a cry and finally ended up as a full-blown attack. Fear and anger are especially adept at increasing the voltage to the point where we feel that they are alien, evil, demonic forces acting without our will. They are actually just aspects of consciousness forced into inhuman intensity by repression. Repression says, “If I don’t look at you, you will leave me alone.” To which the shadow answers, “I can do things that will make you look at me.”
Bringing consciousness to any energy defuses it: This follows naturally from the last statement. If an energy demands your attention, then paying attention will begin to satisfy it. An overlooked child isn’t placated by one glance. It takes time to change any behavior for good or ill and, like children, our shadow energies get stuck in patterns and habits. But this doesn’t alter the general truth that if you bring light into the shadow, its distortions start to lessen and eventually are healed. Is there time enough and patience to do the whole job thoroughly? There’s no fixed answer to that. Depression, for example, is a complex response that can be healed by insight, compassion, patience, caring attention from others, willingness, and professional therapy. Or you can take a pill and not bother. The choice is personal and varies from person to person. Conditions as apparently hopeless as childhood autism have been cured by parents who spent enormous amounts of time and attention to bring a child back from darkness. The darkness was a distortion in consciousness that needed light to be cured. The shadow in all its forms requires consciousness in the form of light and love, and the only limit to healing is how much of ourselves we are willing to give to the project.
The shadow itself is not evil and therefore not your enemy: If the preceding statements are true, then this one must be also. I realize that for many people there is a huge barrier in the form of “the other,” someone outside themselves whose evil is unquestioned. Sixty years ago “the other” lived in Germany and Japan; thirty years ago it lived in the Soviet Union; today it lives in the Middle East. Such people find evil easier to explain by never losing sight of