Navigating Your Shadow During Dark Times

About a year before psychiatrist Carl Jung passed away, he was asked if he thought World War 3 could be avoided.

(It was around 1960.)

His response would seem cryptic to anyone unfamiliar with inner work.

He said that the only way WW3 could be avoided is if enough individuals learned how to hold the opposites together within themselves.

Let’s unpack what that means …

So what are the opposites?

The opposites Jung spoke of are the common dualities we’re all familiar with:

• Light versus dark
• Good versus evil
• Superiority versus inferiority
• And so on

Now, why did Jung say we need to hold “both sides” within us?

I mean, who wants to hold the darkness, right?

So here’s where the insights of depth psychology meet with many ancient Eastern philosophies:

Light and dark go together—hand in hand.

We can’t have one without the other.

And the more we push away one side—say darkness—the stronger that side becomes.

And so we’re left with two options:

Option #1: Cut ourselves off from one side (usually darkness) and identify with the other (light).

Option #2: Find ways to hold both sides within us.

Of course, we generally don’t make any conscious decisions here.

Most people don’t even know these options exist.

And because of this lack of awareness, we default to option #1.

Option #1 is what creates our shadow.

The shadow represents all of the parts of ourselves that we aren’t conscious of.

And this brings us back to what Jung meant by how to avoid another war.

Only if enough individuals get to know and integrate their shadows can we avoid another world war.

Without knowing our shadow, our minds remain divided.

And the darkness that we deny within ourselves must seek an outlet.

That outlet eventually expresses itself on the world stage.

It takes the form of totalitarianism, fascism, dictatorships, cruelty, ritual sacrifices, holocausts, and a host of things many of us prefer not to think about.

But that’s part of the problem.

When we don’t want to think about these things—and we avoid exploring the darkness within ourselves—that’s when it begins to manifest in the outside world …

The Inner reflects the Outer. And vice versa.

The outer world is a reflection of our inner world.

So it’s highly instructive to observe the world stage in an effort to better understand ourselves.

A world in turmoil is a sign of our overall internal mental and emotional state.

The rise of totalitarianism is a sign that too many of us have projected authority outside of ourselves.

It means we haven’t owned our inner authority and claimed our sovereignty.

The mainstream media’s effective manipulation of the majority means too many of us are engaged in self-deception.

It means we are playing the “innocent one” and staying in disbelief while keeping our heads buried in the sand.

The fact that many of us might feel helpless, weak, and ready to submit to a coercive authority means we are divorced from our instincts and we haven’t tapped into our inner strength.

All of these signs highlight the fact that we, as a people, are not holding the opposites together.

Beware of the “Light Side” trap.

This brings me to perhaps the most alluring and yet destructive trap of all.

It’s the trap that so many well-intended individuals fall into along their path.

I think it’s accurate to say that the vast majority of individuals who become “spiritual” fall into this trap—at least for a while.

This trap hijacked my own development for over a decade until I started to confront my shadow.

We might call it the Light Side trap or the Spirituality Trap.

This trap is one of “love and light,” “ascension,” and “increasing your frequency.”

Individuals seeking love, light, and peace are generally the most divorced from their shadow.

They desperately want to go UP, but they do so at the expense of looking DOWN.

That is, they are ungrounded, which fosters self-deception and delusion.

And the more these individuals try to increase their frequency—to “vibrate at a higher level”—the more the darkness grows both within themselves AND the outer world.

I cannot overstate how absolutely destructive this trap is for humanity.

Yet, if you try to explain this to someone in the energy field of “love and light,” they often can’t process what you’re saying. That’s how powerfully deceptive this trap can be.

The Art of War

Now, fast forward 60 years later from Jung’s statement about world war.

We find ourselves in a difficult predicament. As a people, we are just as ignorant of our shadow as we were during Jung’s time.

Plus today, life is far more complex.

The war has already begun. (In fact, it actively started over two decades ago.)

But it’s a silent war.

It’s largely an information war—a war over the minds of the people.

As Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, “All warfare is based on deception.”

We are most susceptible to external trickery when we are engaged in self-deception.

Many monsters guard the gateway to freedom.

Thankfully, the more we get to know our shadow, the less inclined we are toward self-deception.

It’s a very grounding process (to put it mildly).

Growing through this process takes us through many challenging confrontations with various “monsters”:

• Disillusionment
• Terror
• Rage
• Deep-seated regret
• Depression

These monsters are everpresent.

They grow bigger and stronger when we try to run from them.

(Imagine how big these monsters can become in those professing “love and light” and “ascension.”)

Why do we have so many monsters?

And why must we walk through these challenging gateways?

These monsters are within us because of our trauma.

Whether we know it or not, we all experienced a great deal of trauma during childhood.

And this trauma is stored within our bio-energetic field.

We carry it with us every day. It influences virtually everything we do—including how we think, feel, and behave.

Many people seem to believe that when you address your trauma, it simply goes away.

Yet, where is it going to go?

It’s not a function of eliminating the trauma. Instead, the key to healing is to:

• Become conscious of our trauma,
• Understand what really happened, and
• Clearly see how it tends to operate within us.

Only then are we in a position to regulate it as adults.

So here’s the “good” news:

The more conscious we become of our monsters, the smaller and less influential they become.

The more we learn to hold the opposites within us, the less tension and anxiety we experience.

The more integrated we become, the more we move toward wholeness.

And as such, the more we know our shadow, the less influenced we are by manipulation and deception by those currently preying on our trauma and ignorance.

In fact, this entire mass psychosis we’re all witnessing and experiencing is a clear sign of our collective trauma.

When a critical mass of individuals reaches this level of integration and self-awareness, the entire grand theatre play—this mass psychosis of epic proportions—quickly falls to an abrupt end.

It’s all in our hands far more than we may realize.

Stay vigilant and alert,
Scott