A Revolution of the Spirit

How gratifying to have one's opinion verified by experts first thing in the morning, via the daily paper.

Lately what I've been saying to anyone who'll listen is that the whole premise of our economy is unsound. The GNP is based on all of us selling as many things to one another as we possibly can. Things we usually don't need, that there are already too many of, that the world does not have the resources for us to keep making. How sustainable is that? This system does need a shot in the arm, there's no doubt about it, but beyond that this system needs to fundamentally change its whole underlying idea, its structural vision.

So how pleasant it was to run into Benjamin R. Barber on the editorial page of The Oregonion today (Saturday, January 31. I'll add a link to it as soon as one of my kids tells me how to do so.)

Barber is a senior fellow at Demos, and the author of Jihad vs. Mac World and Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults and Swallow Citizens Whole.

Here's a quote from an essay in today's paper called "A new american revolution?" Rethinking the Soul of Capitalism:

Today we find ourselves in another seminal moment. Will be use it to rethink the meaning of capitalism and the relationship between our material bodies and the spirited psyches they are meant to serve? Between the commodity fetishism and single-minded commercialism that we have allowed to dominate us, and the pluralism, heterogeneity and spiritedness that constitute our professed national character?

I love this question.

What if we didn't spend all our time and money making things we don't need, and started concentrating our resources on making things that benefit us all and enriched our culture?

What if we produced less junk and more soul?

What if we spent our time building and staffing first-rate, engaging schools? What if preschoolers, the elderly, and those too mentally challenged to hold a job, were cared for by well-paid experts in quality facilities?

What is the basis of our society wasn't rampant, unbridled capitalism--the most ruthless economic system ever invented other than outright oppression--but became instead the pursuit of non-material happiness?

The struggle for the soul of capitalism is, then, a struggle between the nation's economic body and its civic soul: a struggle to put capitalism in its proper place, where it serves our nature and needs rather than manipulating and fabricating whims and wants. Saving capitalism means bringing it into harmony with spirit--with prudence, pluralism and those "things of the public" (res publica) that define our civic souls. A revolution of the spirit. Is the new president up to it? Are we?
--Benjamin R. Barber, Rethinking the Soul of Capitalism

What A Difference a Few Months Can Make!

Having been absent from the blogosphere since October due to family difficulties, what a welcome change to return to it only twelve days from the inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States.

Unbelievable. Unprecedented. Indescribably delicious.

The USA is about to have a President who understands the concept of the human shadow, although he may not call it that. Who understands that name-calling, fact-twisting, blame-mongering or sending-to-hell will not solve any of our problems, and is, in fact, holding us back.

Who shows a graceful awareness of his country's shortcomings as well as his own, and shows the willingness and the ability to confront both.

Hallelujah.

While you wait for inauguration day, read both of his books, available now in paperback: Dreams from My Father, a clear-sighted and thoughtful memoir, and The Audacity of Hope, a succinct history of how the US got where she is today, and what can be done about it.

That creaking sound you hear, right there at the edge of your hearing, is the sound of the wheel finally starting to turn...

Workshop on "Greeting the Shadow in the Body"

Greeting the Shadow in the Body
A Workshop on Integrating the Human Shadow

A time for noticing, with body and mind,
the parts of our beings we usually forget.
Practical teaching in shadow work,
during a guided yoga session.

With Jay Fields, Certified Yoga Instructor &
Kay Plumb, author of Using Beauty and her Beast to Introduce the Human Shadow

December 6, 2008
12:30pm to 5pm
$50/person
OmBase
6357 SW Capitol Highway, Portland, OR 90239
(in the Hillsdale neighborhood, across from Food Front)

Wear comfortable clothes. Bring a yoga mat if you have one.
No prior experience in yoga or shadow work required.
Call 503.285.9210 to reserve a spot.

Election Murk

There is no better time than election time to study the human shadow.

When we point our finger at another and accuse them of doing what we ourselves are doing right at that very moment, we are talking straight out of our shadow.

As in, "Barack Obama will say whatever he needs to to get elected." --John McCain

Accusing others of doing what we are actually doing ourselves--the best offense is a good defense--is now so pervasive, elections in this country have gotten so unreal, so much stranger than fiction, that we might as well quote George Orwell:

"...Newspeak words have two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts... it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink...

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party member knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt...

To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies--all this is indispensably necessary.

Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. "

--from 1984, by George Orwell

Tolle's Terminology

Another way to look at ego and shadow is to lump them both together, which is what Eckhart Tolle does in A New Earth, Awakening to Your Life's Purpose. While his approach may be driving some Jungians crazy -- It's not that easy! I can hear them holler -- it does have a certain 'practical shortcut' appeal.

Your ego is your persona, the masks you wear every day when you go outside in public, who you think you are, who you tell people you are.

Your shadow holds the parts of your personality you don't want showing, the parts you would never consciously tell anyone else about.

Since Tolle's aim is to get people to go beyond thinking to Being, he lumps the ego and the shadow together. And it does work for the purposes of his discussion, because neither is your true essence. Neither is "a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all human systems of thought," as Jospeh Campbell defined God. (Campbell also defines God as the Ground of Being, which is my personal favorite since I'm a gardener. )

But in Tolle's approach I miss the poetry of "the brighter the light, the darker the shadow." My dualistically-conditioned-mind responds immediately to images of Jekyll and Hyde, light and shadow, what I show vs. what I hide, what I must project onto others vs. what I can face in myself.

Thank goodness we don't have to make a choice. We can learn from Jung, and we can learn from Tolle.

K

Ego and Shadow

Kay,

The "shadow" is how I have always thought of the ego. A subversive element to it, more interested in maintaining itself than anything else. Distorting the reality of situations to suit its purpose and its survival.

Marilyn


Hhmmm... isn't that true for each part, ego and shadow? That unless consciously injected with compassion, each is only out for its own survival?

We're born knowing how to flee. How to fight. How to snatch a worm out of mama bird's beak before our siblings can. How to knock the other hummingbirds off the perch.

But calmness, compassion, contentment, mercy, forgiveness... the only way I know to develop those traits is by conscious practice.

That's where shadow work comes in. If we don't learn how to love ourselves first, with all our flaws, if we don't handle all the selfish little baby birds and menacing beasts that dwell in our own shadows compassionately --humorously, even -- then we can't cut anyone else any slack.

Jeremiah Abrams calls shadow work "the pursuit of an unhypocritical life." That's a hell of a good definition.

Hell of a task, too.

K

Marilyn's Question

Kay,

I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your book. I know that you have been told this a million times, but here is one more, it was so much in your voice. I could imagine you sitting in front of me with your faint Texas accent, saying those very things in those very words. I have loaned it to a couple of friends and both have liked it. I wanted to ask you how you differentiate between the "shadow" and the "ego."

Marilyn

If only we could! What an excellent question.

Your ego is how you learn to act as you grow up. Your ego is who "Marilyn" is.

Your shadow is everything that doesn't fit into the picture of "Marilyn." It's Marilyn's opposite, everything Marilyn doesn't want to be.

Both grow up together, side by side, hand in hand. Every time your parents said it was bad to get angry, or your peers thought it wasn't cool to be so enthusiastic, et cetera et cetera, something voluble and lively fled the light world of your ego and hid in the darkness of your shadow. As repressive as parents and school systems tend to be, most of the juice goes into our shadows.

Thus your ego learns how to please, how to get around in your culture, and gets all the credit out in the world -- let's say Marilyn is a very hard worker -- while your poor ole shadow has to hide in what Robert Bly calls the "long black bag we drag behind us" thinking I'd really like a day off, sometime, you know? and eventually getting frustrated enough to sneak past your ego and take swipes at other people. That John Doe is so lazy!

"Shadow work" is noticing that you're unreasonably upset at John Doe, and asking yourself why. Hhmmm... why am I being so snarky? If I'm getting angry over someone else looking relaxed, maybe I need to relax myself. Schedule a little more play into my life. Shadow work pulls something out of the dark bag -- the unconscious -- and brings it up into the daylight world where you can see it and decide what to do about it -- makes it conscious. Better for you, better for John Doe.

Here's a good description of ego-shadow formation, from Meeting the Shadow, by Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams:

"As ego comes, so goes the shadow: the disowned self is a natural by-product of the ego-building process, which eventually becomes a mirror image of the ego. We disown that which does not fit into our developing picture of who we are, thus creating a shadow. Because of the necessarily one-sided nature of ego development, the neglected, rejected, and unacceptable qualities in us accumulate in the unconscious psyche and take form as an inferior personality--the personal shadow.

However, what is disowned does not go away. It lives on within us--out of sight, out of mind, but nevertheless real--an unconscious alter ego hiding just below the threshold of awareness. It often erupts unexpectedly under extreme emotional circumstances. "The devil made me do it!" is the adult euphemism that explains our alter ego behavior.

Ego and shadow are thus in an age-old antagonism that is a well-known motif in mythology: the relationship of opposing twins or brothers--one good, the other evil--symbolic representations of the ego-alter ego in psychological development. Taken together, these sibling opposites form a whole. In the same way, when the ego assimilates the disowned self, we move toward wholeness."
--Meeting the Shadow, The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature,
--Edited by Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams, p. 47