The Monthly Aspectarian: Jeremiah, when you write: "The Shadow begins with the earliest emancipation of the I from the great Unity consciousness from which we have all come," you seem to be saying that the Shadow is inherent in duality itself.

Jeremiah Abrams: It's inherent in the nature of the mind. The mind is busy making dualistic distinctions from the git-go. From the first moment that we're aware of ourselves as distinct from our environment. Somewhere at that moment of emancipation, which usually occurs somewhere between
1 1/2 and 2 1/2 years of age, our little ego is struggling to get a sense of I and Not I, and so Shadow becomes the Not I. The duality begins very early. It's the nature of mind to make these distinctions. You can think of it as a disease of the mind as well. [laughter]

TMA: I was thinking in terms of separation from the One.

JA: Well, it may be a response to our being cast out of Eden. That's one way to think of that initial experience of separation. If you have children, you realize that that sense of unity and continuum is there in most children. At some point it's disrupted and we see this in the cycles of change. Most human beings go through this cycle of psychological change.

TMA: As the child separates the I from the Not I, a lot of what they separate from the I really isn't them. What the Shadow really refers to are the parts that really are them that they separate out, yes?

JA: The illusion is that it's all us. But in order to survive as an ego in the world, one has to have an identity that gets support and nurturance and attention. So often what we choose to identify as I is what we cleverly ferret out is what the important sources of love in those early environments wants us to be.

TMA: So what makes Mom and Dad smile is I and what makes them frown is Not I?

JA: Very often. I like to think the culture is at work as well, both through parents and family, but we're reinforced in many ways. The influences are very strong early on in terms of having an adaptive ego. And that would be the sources of love in the immediate family and the cultural values, too, about how one is to be. They come through all kinds of sources. Later on, they come from peers and school and other forms of socialization. But I like to think that having a Shadow is a price that we do have to pay to get the power, being part of a civilized society.

TMA: I would think that obviously, in a more dysfunctional family, the Shadow would be greater. But even in whatever one could conceive of as the most ideal family, there would still be Shadow.

JA: Yes, there's always Shadow. Everyone has Shadow. That idea of the dysfunctional family — what happens is that what isn't owned by the parental generation becomes inherited by the children, so it's like a family curse. It's not so much that the child may identify with it, the child may in fact resist what they experience in the parents' Shadow, but it becomes then something that's proprietary as part of the family tree. I like to use the term "family curse" because what one's parents haven't worked out becomes our psychological heritage.

TMA: "The sins of the fathers... [shall be visited upon the sons]," so to speak?

JA: So to speak, yes. You know, Jung used to say, using the example of a very pious Quaker that he knew, an Englishman who was one of these, what he called "statistical people," who thought he was everything he knew he was . . . in other words, he had no awareness of being anything outside of his ego identity and was quite pious . . . and what happens in a family like this is that the children end up acting out the father's Shadow. One daughter was a prostitute and the son a drug addict. This is one manifestation of how the family curse works. The parent may be in denial and it gets transmitted directly to the children.

TMA: What are some of the other major sources of Shadow?

JA: Primarily, Shadow is created as an alter ego, like a personage, a sub-personality within us based on what we've found works for us in the world as well. It's a developmental phenomenon that occurs throughout early life. I like to think that the whole first half of life is really devoted to figuring out how to develop the independence and the success and the achievement that we're conditioned to pursue, at least in our culture. So the sources of Shadow, in other words, what doesn't fit, what one doesn't want to identify with, what the person would rather not be, comes from school, comes from — in the case of the child these days it's coming from the media in a very strong message, and a sometimes confusing message. At lot of the information about what is okay to be and what feels good comes from one's peers.

TMA: There's a great deal of baby being thrown out with bath water . . . and yet, are not some things contained in the Shadow that we would be better off without?

JA: Well, of course. The qualities that do need censorship or what we could say, repression, the anti-social elements that we all contain — the murderer and the suicide and the tyrant — these do take a moral effort to contain and repress. But the idea of having these qualities is more dynamic than this.. Most people project their Shadow onto others rather than really taking ownership of it.

The way to de-potentiate acting out or becoming one's Shadow is to own it, to see it not just as a mote in the other person's eye. These qualities that really deserve to be held in check — it doesn't work to project them, either; it's perhaps more devastating to give them to others than to assume that we're good. I think holding them in check is only part of the process but yet, Shadow refers to the parts of us that are inferior and are undeveloped and need to be morally developed.

TMA: There are also positive things hidden the in the Shadow.

JA: Absolutely. Jung talked about "the gold in the Shadow," and that's definitely there. I like to think that a lot of people's real, natural gifts and talents may be caught in the Shadow because there was no one who really recognized and supported and nurtured these native talents. So there is gold in the Shadow. But I think Jung is also referring to the idea that if we can accept the worst in ourselves, we can transform it, and that's a key. And there are aspects of personality that really do belong in Shadow. We'll always have the Shad-ow. We'll always have these tendencies. What to do with them is the question.

I think the best thing to with them is, if you want to be a joyful person, you need to need to know your depression; if you want to be a good person, you need to know your evil and not separate the two from knowing each other.

TMA: Then if I hear your correctly, what you're saying is yes, there are some elements of the Shadow that need to be repressed . . .

JA: Held in check, accepted as such as inferior and not to be acted out.

TMA: But they need to be illumined rather than being stuffed down even further.

JA: Yes, it's a way of absorbing one's own Shadow rather than leaving it to hang out there in the world as a projection. Really saying, "This darkness is mine," to absorb it and own it, to realize that we ourselves are the projections of evil that we make onto others and the way to neutralize these capacities we have to be destructive is to own them. You can think of them as a question of practices like the Middle Way in Buddhism where you're balancing these tensions of opposites. You're balancing the dualities and you yourself and your personality or your soul becomes a container that can contain that tension between these oppositions. It's not so subtle; most people learn how to do this. It's when we caught acting out the Shadow that we realize that we're not as complete as we thought we were. Most of us want to be good, to do the right thing.

TMA: I think that it's clear that if there's going to be separation from the One then it is dependent upon duality. There can be no separation from the One without duality.

JA: Right. Our task then becomes to resolve dualistic notions and Shadow is one half of a duality. You know, Carl Jung thought a lot about this. It was probably the most pressing theme in all of his work. His famous remark is "I'd rather be whole than good." He's really stressing the duality that most of us struggle with if we want to be good, if we want to do the right thing. In so doing, we often aspire to the light or to the spiritual high and create a very dense Shadow that follows us because we're pushing ourselves away from it. We want to identify with the righteous, the well behaved, the appropriate.

TMA: Well yes, I was going to say, there's relative good. There's consensual reality's version of good and then there's what we may perceive as a higher good.

JA: So the work with the Shadow is really an individual moral effort in that it really differentiates even from consensual reality. It's not really an intellectual activity; it's more about feeling the pain of being at odds with yourself.

TMA: You're going off in kind of new direction with your book, Soul Making, but it really isn't that new, is it.

JA: No, this is the deeper background, it's the context for Shadow work. As I've been teaching and working with these ideas over the past ten years since I published my first work on the Shadow, I've been wanting to draw out what the context of the Shadow is. It seems to be that doing the Shadow work is part of the process of becoming more incarnated, having a soul. So Soul-making refers to this process of developing the capacity to reflect and to develop psychological awareness.

TMA: I'm reminded of Gurdjieff's book, Meetings with Remarkable Men. I think near the end, he meets somebody from a monastery who puts forth the theory that people don't really have souls, they have to be developed.

JA: There's a connection there.

TMA: Can you talk about that?

JA: Well, I think it's somewhat of a presumptuous idea that we come in with a soul. The idea of the soul being a given stands in contradistinction to the experience we have, if you observe the development of awareness. You could think of soul as a perspective on things, not as a theological notion, not as an entity itself. It's not even as if it's inside of us; it may be more likely that we're inside the soul. It's a perspective on things, and it's a developed perspective that uses our capacity to give meaning to our experience.

TMA: The developed soul would be a more completed self.

JA: Yes, it's this ability to sit between the doer and the deed and to endow mere events with meaning and turn them into experiences. This is a capacity that we develop. Many people in our culture are suffering from soul-less-ness. You know, the emphasis on "finding" soul right now has to do with paying attention to the dimension of meaning.

I'm reminded that when I was younger, I had a friend who worked for the District Attorney's office in a large city and the people they generally had to process through their office, they referred to as skeletons; that was all that was left; there was no soul there. But from a more poetic vantage, we might think about John Keats' statement that the world itself is a vale of soul-making. This is the use of human incarnation — to make a soul, create a soul, to create this capacity to reflect. That's what the mythopoetic vision of soul-making is about. I think the quality of soul is the part of our experience that sees with a certain dispassion. That this capacity to see is what Soul-Making is about.

TMA: In your workshops, how to do help people to do this?

JA: Rather than get into this convoluted intellectualization about it, I use a very direct methodology. I call it The Dreamtime Journey. It's derivative work. It's an evolved form of what originally started out as holo-tropic breathwork that others began to use as integrated breathwork. It's a form of altered states work where I create a set and setting for people to drop down below the threshold of reverie and in a very safe way go into an altered state and have a journey, much like a shaman's journey, and have a direct experience of the images that are working through them at the given time of the journey. This lasts about two or three hours. We use music and breath to activate this experience, as an induction for the experience. We spend the rest of time having people use art media to symbolize what they're experienced and then to integrate what came up.

It's as a highly experiential process. It involves some focused bodywork, but like I said, the maps themselves are less important than the experience.

TMA: Experience is the teacher.

JA: I'm quite good with maps; I like to think I have a good sense of direction and a good sense of how to use language to talk about the experience but I'm more interested in the experience itself.

TMA: You can describe for a hundred years, but one must experience to know.

JA: I've been using and evolving this process for the past five years, and it's very potent. It's a healing state, going into the altered state. I think we've learned this from shamanic awareness and the neo-shamanic movement in the culture, that the altered state heals. I tend to emphasize the sacred aspect when we're doing this experiential work. Usually it's done in dyads: one person will sit and hold the sacred space while the other can do the descent. Sometimes it's quite a joyful and powerful, blissful experience. Sometimes you meet your demons, sometimes it's biographical and you resolve some unfinished business with the family, sometimes it's transpersonal and you have a visionary experience. You may be visited by angels, you may experience past lives. The important thing is to trust your images, to learn how to trust your own process.

TMA: A person would encounter what they need to.

JA: Yes. It's very similar to the work I was trained to do as a Jungian analyst, to work with the dream material as it arises spontaneously in others. The same face as when I heard someone's dream: that is exactly what you need to be paying attention to. What comes in an experience like this is exactly your piece of soul that wants to be integrated right now. That's why I call it The Dreamtime Journey . . . it's entering the dream-time state. You know, the idea that our consciousness floats on a vast mythopoetic ocean at all times available to us: the dreamtime. This is one way to access it. It's often an exciting event. Every time I do this for people, it stirs the soup.

TMA: Give people a real experience and something will happen.

JA: Yes. I tend to like to emphasize the integrative part of the workshop. The actual dreamtime journey is the laboratory experience and what follows for the rest of the time we have to-gether, through the group dialogue, will be the integrative work using art media and dialogue.

Jeremiah Abrams has 27 years' experience as a psychotherapist, teacher, trainer, group facilitator and writer, working to shift the healing paradigm from ego-centered self-improvement to soul-centered psychology. His books include the best-selling Meeting the Shadow: The Dark Side of Human Nature; The Shadow in America: Reclaiming the Soul of a Nation; Reclaiming the Inner Child; the forthcoming 27 Ways to Recognize Your Shadow, and Living from the Inside Out, which is about ways to access the dreamtime and having trust in your own inner images.

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