The Dangers of Innocence

Here's what Rollo May has to say about the intersection of shadow material and morality in his essay entitled "The Dangers of Innocence":

The ethic of Christianity in our time became allied with the individualism which emerged in the Renaissance. This increasingly became the ethics of the isolated individual, standing bravely in his lonely situation of self-enclosed integrity... Ethics and religion became largely a matter of Sunday, the weekdays being relegated to making money--which one always did in ways that kept one's own character impeccable. We had then the curious situation of the man of impeccable character directing a factory that unconscionably exploited its thousands of employees. It is interesting that fundamentalism, that form of Protestantism which puts most emphasis on the individualistic habits of character, tends to be also the most nationalistic and war-minded of the sects, and the most rabid against any form of international understanding with other countries.

We need not--indeed, we must not--surrender our concern with integrity and our valuing of the individual. I am proposing that our individualistic gains since the Renaissance be set in balance with our new solidarity, our willingly assumed responsibility for our fellow men and women. In these days of mass communication, we can no longer be oblivious to their needs; and to ignore then is to express our hatred. Understanding, in contrast to ideal love, is a human possibility--understanding for our enemies as well as our friends.

...our capacity for evil hinges on breaking through our pseudoinnocence. So long as we preserve our one-dimensional thinking, we can cover up deeds by pleading innocent. This antediluvian escape from conscience is no longer possible. We are responsible for the effect of our actions, and we are also responsible for becoming as aware as we can of these effects.

...Life consists of achieving good not apart from evil but in spite of it.

--Rollo May, "The Dangers of Innocence," in
Meeting the Shadow, Tarcher & St. Martin's Press, pgs.174-5.

The Shadow in Relationships

"Sometimes I forget completely what companionship is. Unconscious and insane, I spill sad Energy everywhere."
--Rumi

Being troubled by the shadow in my own primary relationship, I thought it was high time I re-read what James Hollis has to say on the subject. The following excerpts are from his book, Why Good People Do Bad Things, Understanding Our Darker Selves:

"Our first relational messages are found in the primal bonding experiences... these parent-child encounters thereby constitute archaic messages that are always humming beneath the surface of our contemporary engagements with others. The more intimate the relationship, the more the archaic drama with its directives is present, whether recognized or not... while we believe ourselves free at any moment, how often are we in service to these archaic, primal messages, or better, are we ever free of them? Their ghostly presence in our social life and in our intimacies constitutes a continuing Shadow dimension whereby we are not who we are in the moment, but who we have been, reflexively, historically defined..."

"...the narcissistic agenda of any individual psyche will have a strong urge to impose itself upon the relationship in service to getting its needs met, even at the cost of the well-being of the other... The more damaged one's history, or the weaker one's sense of self, the greater is this narcissistic tendency and the more rigid and controlling the dynamics of the relationship... Thus, the Shadow of narcissism haunts all relationships, even the most evolved, and constitutes the ethical challenge of relationship, namely, 'to what degree can I truly love the Other by keeping my own needs from dominating them?'...

"...How many relationships are governed by the principle of love, by caring for the otherness of the other? How many are impaired, not through continuing enlargement and mutual support of their separate journeys, but by dint of habit, fear of change, lack of permission to live one's own journey, and refusal to accept the summons to their own responsibility?... love becomes a Shadow task for us all when it 1) asks more of us than that which makes us comfortable, 2) asks us to examine our own complexes and regressive imagoes, and 3) asks a greater generosity of spirit than we consider comfortable...

"...A relationship should serve the growth of each party toward becoming more nearly who he or she is capable of becoming. I do not see that a relationship in which people "take care of each other" is worthy of the name of relationship, at least not a loving, mature relationship. Love is supportive and caring, and therefore we freely offer gifts to each other... gifts that sometimes ask considerable sacrifice or ourselves. Kindness, affection, and empathy are part of any healthy relationship, and doing for the other is a gift to both of us, as long as it is not in service to an old codependency, or a sullen compliance...

"...Love asks independence of both parties, freedom, not control, not guilt, not coercion, not manipulation. Dependency is not love; it is dependency--it is an abrogation of the essential responsibility of each of us to grow up, to assume full responsibility for our lives. Not to take on this challenge is a flight from adulthood, no matter how mature a person may be in other areas of endeavor... We all find it easier to blame our partners than to grow up, or to recognize that we are the only ones present in each scene in that long-running drama we call our life. It stands to reason that we are the ones charged with its outcomes and consequences, not our partners. Acknowledging this responsibility is easy enough in the abstract, but it is fearfully challenging in the context of daily life when our will is fragmented, when we are vulnerable, and when we fall back into our archaic complexes...

"...(A typical marriage) carries and suffers the burden of our chief fantasy, namely, that the magical "other" will fix things for us, render life meaningful, heal our wounds, and help us avoid the task of growing up and facing the huge existential vacuum that all conscious souls must engage. Because life, with all its possibilities, all its decisions, is so huge, we cling to the small, and hope the Other will spare us the task of growing up. But, since they do not, cannot, and should not, we are angry with them. This is Shadow material, for it feeds on that which lies within us, that which makes us uncomfortable with ourselves, that which intimidates us...

"...acknowledging that we are the only constant in every relationship requires taking on the problem of our own Shadow."


--from Why Good People Do Bad Things, Understanding our Darker Selves, by James Hollis, Ph.D., pgs. 86-98.

Neural Nets... or Wagon Ruts?

At a workshop of Jerry Ruhl's recently, I learned about what brain researchers and scientists call "neural networks." (Since anything worth talking about alludes to the internet, you say "neural nets.")

Basically, neural nets exist because brains are very busy. And since they're so very busy, they take shortcuts to get from one place to another whenever they can.

So if you've done something, or felt something, or thought something, or heard something one time, you're very liable to experience it in exactly the same way the next time it comes up. Because you already have a pattern -- or a neural network -- for it in your brain.

And the more times you go over that thought or feeling, the deeper that neural network will get. There are places in Eastern Oregon where you can still see wagon ruts made by settlers back in the 1800s. That is what happens in the brain when we go over and over something. Think Rush Limbaugh. Think anyone who says the same type of thing over and over, with as much emotion as possible, whether it applies to the situation they're in or not. By that time, is it a neural net, or a wagon rut?

While this phenomenon is not exactly new -- Carl Jung first started talking about it almost 100 years ago, but he called them "complexes": sets of emotions attached to a fragment of your history, which are charged with feeling and energy, and are autonomous, which means they come up on their own -- it is getting more terrifying all the time.

Terrifying because we live in a world with thousands of highly effective ways to communicate, but a world where people do not tend to think about what they're saying. A world where most just say whatever pops into their heads first, or whatever they've heard someone else saying, with no reflection whatsoever. A world where many people actually make their living saying whatever pops into their heads first, to as many people as possible, and as hatefully as they can. (Sorry to pick on you here again, Rush. But you do make a juicy target.)

Folks, this is not good. As we all know, as we've been told repeatedly by every sage who ever walked the earth, minds need calming, not inflaming. Unless we're at the saint or Buddha stage, a good 80% of "whatever pops into our heads first" is going to be feeling-toned, overly emotional bullshit, capable of doing great damage to others. Not wisdom, not information, just complex. Knee-jerk, reactionary, monkey-mind babble.

Which we now pass around to one another faster than the world's worst virus.

Truly terrifying.

from The Red Book, on our current political climate

"The spirit of this time considers itself extremely clever, like every such spirit of the time...

The clever person mocks wisdom...
he uses the pointed, poisonous weapon...
But the mockery falls on the mocker...
and he suffocates on his own scorn.

We cannot save ourselves from the cleverness of the spirit of this time through increasing our cleverness, but through accepting what our cleverness hates most."

--The Red Book, CG Jung, Edited by Sonu Shamdasani, p. 237



Massive amounts of contempt for others will not get us anywhere.

To progress, we have to accept the Beauty in others as well as the Beast in ourselves.

I'm interested in the human shadow, but this is ridiculous.

There is SO much shadow, so much blaming, so much accusing others of doing what one is actually doing oneself, so much newspeak, doublethink, and flat out BULLSHIT in politics right now, I don't even know where to start. I don't even want to get into it. How --and when-- did the American flag become a symbol for hatred and bigotry and name-calling, for obstructionism rather than leadership?

Hhhmm... Howard Zinn might have said 'from the very beginning, my dear...'



I can think of a good bumper sticker, though:

Not Self-Destructive Enough To Vote Republican

MUST we have more "The Book of Eli"s ?

Parts of David Denby's review in the January 18th New Yorker are too good not to repeat.




...I'm beginning to wonder if filmmakers aren't using the world's end as a trope to license a neo-primitivist ethos. When people must scavenge just to survive, any kind of violence is justified. ...

"The Book of Eli"combines the maximum in hollow piety with remorseless vilolence. It's a true American commercial product, overflowing with barbarous acts and improving bromides.

Uh huh.

What do we see when we look within?