singularity

A Little Book on the Human Shadow - Robert Bly (Highlight: 70; Note: 0)

◆ Foreword

â–Ș if any help was going to arrive to lift me out of my misery, it would come from the dark side of my personality

◆ Part 1

â–Ș I have suffered and survived the night, Bathed in dark water, like any blade of grass.

â–Ș Hatred of Yin at the start gave New England a fierce energy; but three hundred years later, the same hatred drains people and leads to some sort of spiritual death

â–Ș If the American drama begins with the Puritans killing turkeys, then Kissinger’s and Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia takes place in the third act.

â–Ș What do we do then, to encourage the crow to arrive? That is the subject of this little book. The

◆ Part 2

â–Ș we don’t invent things, we just remember.

â–Ș So I maintain that out of a round globe of energy the twenty-year-old ends up with a slice. We

â–Ș substance locked in the bag appears one day somewhere else in the city

â–Ș The rule seems to be: the outside has to be like the inside. That

â–Ș Finding a hostile man to live with would give her someone to blame, and take away the pressure, but that wouldn’t help the problem of the closed bag

â–Ș Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.

â–Ș ‘You are projecting’ becomes among Jungians an accusation. Sometimes projection is helpful and the right thing.” Her

â–Ș No single human being can carry so many projections—that is, so much unconsciousness—and survive. So

â–Ș The audience wants a poet, a hired gun, to come in from out of town.

â–Ș dealing with a network of shadows, a pattern of shadows projected by both sides, all meeting somewhere out in

◆ Part 3

â–Ș But after a few arguments, a few obstinacies, and a few money fights, it occurs to the groom one day that there is something witch-like in his bride that he hadn’t noticed before

â–Ș Many young American men and women in the last twenty years have projected their spiritual guide onto an Asian guru; that projection lasts a while, and then starts to rattle.

â–Ș Lyndon Johnson felt that the Asians were ignoble, and we were noble

â–Ș moral intelligence redefines gross human abuse as an act of love.

â–Ș The soft male often doesn’t have enough of the witch left to say, “Enough!” When

â–Ș When one gives the negative, one gives the positive also.

â–Ș ambiguously weak

â–Ș In Europe the children discipline themselves so that the parents can have a good time; in America the parents discipline themselves so the children can have a good time.”

â–Ș ting the shadow

â–Ș Eating our shadow is a very slow process.

â–Ș said, “I have had to eat many of my own words, and I found the diet very nourishing.”

â–Ș How does one go about eating the shadow or retrieving a projection, practically

â–Ș In daily life one might suggest making the sense of smell, taste, touch, and hearing more acute, making holes in your habits, visiting primitive tribes, playing music, creating frightening figures in clay, playing the drum, being alone for a month, regarding yourself as a genial criminal. A

â–Ș ; if we want our spiritual guide back we write about the spiritual guide rather than passively experience the guide in another person.

â–Ș person who is not an artist can be a Christian.

◆ Part 4

â–Ș The old tradition says that if a man loves God he can become holy in twenty years; but if he hates God he can do the same work in two years.

â–Ș one of the reasons that all of us dream so much is that the dreamer wants to remind us of the amount of shadow that we haven’t absorbed. I

â–Ș there is also a hunter and hermit area of the shadow

â–Ș there is also a hunter and hermit area of the shadow, containing various primitive impulses that have nothing to do with sexuality—maybe a desire to live in the woods, a desire to kill animals and smear their blood on our faces, a desire to get away from all profane life and live religiously like an Australian aborigine.

â–Ș when the shadow is successfully repressed, the person doing it finds it very difficult to talk to other people about feelings.

â–Ș Permissiveness is a misunderstanding of the seriousness of that game.

â–Ș Leonard, in his book called The End of Sex, describes himself as having been enthusiastic about the complete expression of sexuality during the sixties. He now feels that such expression results eventually in some humiliation of the ego, and the psyche as a result loses some of its interest in sexuality; it loses some of its eros.

â–Ș understand through Kurtz’s experience in Heart of Darkness that the Western longing for the primitive is dangerous to the psyche.

â–Ș few men took the image of the wild man as permission for being savage, failing to make any distinction.

â–Ș presence of the female side in him, and his embodiment of positive male sexuality. None of these implies violence toward or domination of others

â–Ș a person who absorbs the shadow becomes not dark, but light and playful.

â–Ș trand Russell had too much light in his personality. You wanted a political leader who was a crow, not a dove or a swallow

â–Ș human being who has done work with the shadow or absorbed the shadow gives a sense of being condensed.

â–Ș condensation, a thickening or a densening, of the psyche which is immediately apparent, and which results in a feeling of natural authority without the authority being demanded.

â–Ș Ronald Reagan has certainly not absorbed his shadow

â–Ș he is still projecting his shadow on Russia, which he calls an evil empire.

â–Ș He’s drawing on a fund of wise-father-longing which Americans project on him.

â–Ș Churchill did absorb his shadow, and he exercised a natural authority.

â–Ș some shift, however small, would have occurred in the whole American psyche in the direction of an ability to admit our dark side. It’s clear that no such change has taken place

â–Ș Some gentle Krishnamurti people asked Joseph Campbell, at one of his lectures, about the spiritual seed brought from India to California in the 1920s by Vivekananda and others. Didn’t he think that this seed was already working, and that a new stage in world culture had already begun? Joseph said, “I can’t assure you of that. As a matter of fact, it is my opinion that the popular culture never gets above the power chakra.”

â–Ș Another way to put it is that people under thirty-five cannot teach themselves or others to eat the shadow. The initiation rituals hinted at in “Iron John” imply and suppose old men who teach younger men how to eat the shadow.

â–Ș expressing is not any more admirable then repressing.

â–Ș Western man or woman lives in a typical pairing of opposites that destroys the soul.

â–Ș Either we defeat Communism or we are defeated by

â–Ș Joseph Campbell describes the two opposites as two horns; and if we get hooked on either, we die.

â–Ș expressing shadow material by itself doesn’t help. The act is more savage than wild.

â–Ș honoring the shadow material. If we don’t live our animal side or our sexual side, that means we don’t honor those parts. It has been said that the greatest harm the Christian church has done is to make people mistrust instincts, but who taught us to mistrust our anger? How can we honor our anger and still not express it routinely?

â–Ș Three honorings come to mind. First of all, anger can happen when listening to others talk. If someone tells you, say, of some abuse that he or she has suffered, and describes it in a flat voice, one may feel anger, a kind of sympathetic anger.

â–Ș Secondly, Marie Louise suggests that we regard our anger as a person and talk to it.

â–Ș We relate to our anger the way Mafia bosses in New Jersey relate to petty mobsters.

â–Ș A guy comes slinking in and the bosses pay him fifty bucks to do a job for them. Then when he comes back they can’t even remember that they told him to do anything, and what’s worse, if anyone goes to the pen, he’s the one.

â–Ș The anger is angry with us for not honoring it, for treating it shabbily, for getting out of it what we want without ever bringing it in and introducing it to our friends, saying, “This is my friend Anger here. He’s a lowly-paid assistant of mine.”

â–Ș shadow is not to be identified with evil, but how does evil fit in?

◆ Part 5

â–Ș we spend the first twenty or twenty-five years of life deciding what should be pushed down into the shadow self, and the next forty years trying to get in touch with that material again.

â–Ș Old cave impulses go there, longings to eat the whole world—if

â–Ș Conrad suspects that at times the shadow will not rejoin the consciousness unless the person has a serious task, which he accepts, such as captaining a ship

â–Ș eyes in the West receive a disproportionate amount of psychic energy

â–Ș to see how, if the senses are sharpened by labor, you begin to merge with the creatures and objects around you

â–Ș when the shadow shoots up into consciousness for a split second, it brings with it the knowledge that we will die. Oddly

â–Ș shadow has to have risen up and invaded the haiku poem, otherwise it is not a haiku.