25: The Shadow Personality

25 

The Shadow Personality 

          The best piece of advice that I got in my life came from a source I would never have imagined, because that just wasn’t my reality at the time; and although it pierced my heart with the deadly accuracy of a skilled swordsman, I had to laugh at the blissful sweetness of the Ascended Master’s advice that was revealed to me through a gifted psychic medium who channeled St. Padre Pio: “He told me to tell you to resist the urge to be right.”

In one blinding flash of insight, I saw through my tragic character flaw that was responsible for so much aggravation in my life; and every time I got the urge to correct someone the Good Saint’s words popped into my mind, and I had to bite my tongue.

I went to this gifted medium for a spiritual reading, and out of this experience came my novel Healing with Padre Pio; and had I not personally experienced what I did with the departed Capuchin monk who suffered the stigmata most of his adult life (fifty years of daily anguish), I would have questioned the veracity of the whole experience. This is why I have taken Gurdjieff’s words literally: “There is only self-initiation into the mysteries of life.”

But why did I have the urge to be right all the time? What was this compulsion, this instinctive need to correct people whenever I felt they were wrong? I did it without thought, and it always got me into trouble because it set me apart as arrogant and insensitive; but I couldn’t help myself and did it anyway, because I was the victim of my own shadow. And that’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing, the shadow side of our personality… 

The shadow is a Jungian concept. It is the dark, repressed side of our personality, and it is not who we think we are. The shadow is our false self, and it is both our damnation and salvation; but because our shadow resides in the unconscious part of our psyche we are blind to the shadow side of our personality, and we even resist the slightest hint of being made aware of our false nature because it threatens our self-image.

“The shadow by nature is difficult to apprehend. It is dangerous, disorderly, and forever in hiding, as if the light of consciousness would steal its very life,” wrote the co-editors Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams in Meeting the Shadow, The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature; but not until we become aware of our shadow and integrate it into our conscious personality will we ever be a whole person, and happy. But where does the shadow come from, and why does it have so much power over us?

In all honesty, I had no awareness of my compulsion to be right; but after the Humble Saint (no one can suffer the holy wounds of Jesus for fifty years and not be humbled) brought it to my attention, I began to notice that I was not alone in my compulsive need to be right, and I soon began to see that this was a defining trait of the shadow personality.

Why, for example, would that Muslim woman risk sabotaging her Canadian citizenship just to wear her niqab during the oath-swearing part of the ceremony if she did not believe that she was right in her religious conviction? What compelled her to take such a dangerous risk if she was not under the influence of her shadow personality? Would her faith have collapsed had she shown her face while swearing allegiance to her new country? Why would she do what she did if she wasn’t convinced that she was right in her conviction?

“The shadow personality develops naturally in every young child,” said Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams; and they explain that children identify with ideal personality traits in their respective cultures to create a socially acceptable persona, and they repress all those qualities that their culture rejects into the shadow part of their personality because they don’t fit into their evolving self-image. So “the ego and the shadow develop in tandem, creating each other out of the same life experience.”

But not only do we create our own ego and shadow personality out of our own life experiences, we also inherit our family shadow—the archetypal matrix of unresolved family karma, the consciousness of all those experiences that one’s family has repressed to the unconscious family psyche; and this can make our life very difficult depending upon our family’s karmic history, which is why it is written that the sins of the parents are visited upon the children. But, still, the mystery remains; why the urge to be right?

The Sufis have a saying: “There are as many ways to God as there are souls.” Which simply means that every soul is its own way to God. Would this be the source of my compulsive need to be right? Would this be why the Muslim woman risked her Canadian citizenship, because she believed her way is more right?

I suspect so, but I cannot solve this mystery on my own; and so I’m going to call upon my Muse to help me work out the answer… 

Can a person live a lie and be authentic?

Let’s, for argument’s sake, say that we do not live one lifetime only but many lives; and let’s further say that there is no eternal damnation in hell, that this is just a prop used by Christianity to keep people on the straight and narrow. And let’s say that one believes in sin and eternal damnation in hell, like I did in my Roman Catholic youth; wouldn’t that be my personal reality, then? But my personal reality wouldn’t be real; it would be false. And by living a false reality, would I be authentic? That’s the issue of the shadow personality: I would be authentic in my Roman Catholic belief, but my personal reality would be false; it would be my life-lie, which characterizes the shadow personality that is real in its falseness.

This is the mystery of human nature, which is paradoxical in its ontology because we are a complex mixture of the consciousness of the real and false, the being and non-being aspect of our ego personality; but some of us are more real than false, and some of us are more false than real, and if we are more false than real then our shadow has unconscious power over our conscious ego and can make our life difficult, like the Muslim woman whose religious convictions compelled her to risk her Canadian citizenship. No doubt she was genuine in her conviction that she had the right to wear her niqab while swearing the oath of allegiance to her new country, but was her personal reality real or false?

As someone wrote into the National Post, it seems that “her religious/cultural practices are more important than the cultural norms of her newly adopted country,” and although she was granted the right by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to not show her face during the public oath-taking ceremony for her citizenship, her behavior flew in the face of our Canadian Prime Minister, and many Canadians; myself included. But why, if not because she was a victim of her own recalcitrant shadow personality?

“If we don’t acknowledge all of who we are, we are guaranteed to be blind-sided by the shadow effect,” said Debbie Ford in her introduction to The Shadow Effect, co-written with Deepak Chopra and Marianne Williamson. “Our shadow incites us to act out in ways we never imagined we could and to waste our vital energy on bad habits and repetitive behavior,” she adds, which can throw one’s life into disarray as it did mine and the Muslim woman with our blind and foolish need to be right; but not since I became aware of that aspect of my shadow personality and began to integrate it into my conscious ego. But, again, why does the shadow have this need to assert itself, which in my case was compulsive? 

 “How can you find a lion that has swallowed you?” asked the eminent psychologist C. G. Jung, with characteristic playful humor; which is why he added that it takes great moral courage to see our shadow. By lion, Jung meant our unconscious shadow that has taken control over our ego personality, which I explored in my literary memoir The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway; and the conclusion that I came to was that the shadow has to assert itself to prove to the world that it is authentic and real, as Ernest Hemingway did over and over again to the despair of everyone who knew him., especially his third wife Martha Gellhorn who described him as a “pathological liar and cruelest man I know.” And the more power our shadow has over ego, the more real we think we are. This is why Debbie Ford wrote, “The conflict between who we are and who we want to be is at the core of the human struggle,” which was why my compulsive need to be right made my life miserable.

“The shadow,” said Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams, “is both the awful thing that needs redemption, and the suffering redeemer who can provide it,” and not until we smelt the gold out of the dross of our shadow personality will be whole, and happy.

 

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24: A Question of Belief

24 

A Question of Belief 

          A long time ago, maybe thirty years or so, I met a man passing through my hometown of Nipigon, Northwestern Ontario carrying a huge cross with a small roller wheel on its base to drag it from town to town; he was going across Canada on a mission.

I met him in the Nipigon Inn Hotel where he was given a room for the night by the owner of the hotel. When asked why he was doing this, his reply was simple: he believed that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, and he was reminding us of Christ’s sacrifice.

Yesterday afternoon Penny and I went into Barrie for an afternoon movie and early dinner, and we caught the show Do You Believe? And wouldn’t you know it, the movie begins with a black man getting on in years dragging a cross, also with two small roller wheels at its base, through the streets of Chicago, and a pastor driving by stops to talk to him.  

The man dragging the cross asks the pastor, “Do you believe?” and that’s how the story begins, because no sooner did he ask this question and there’s a commotion taking place nearby as some black men hijack a van and the man with the cross goes over and tries to talk to the thieves on the error of their ways. One of the gang members called Kriminal holds a gun to the cross-carrying man’s face and threatens him with his life, but the man is ready to die for Jesus; and this sets into motion the dominos of the whole show’s action of how the Cross of Jesus miraculously touched the lives of twelve people.

Do You Believe? was definitely a feel-good movie, though the reviews panned it with noticeable secular animus for the in-your-face Christian theme; but about two thirds of the way into the movie I heard the silent voice of my Muse whisper to me in that special way that always alerts me to literary attention, “A question of belief,” and I knew that this thesis distilled from the movie would be my entry point for today’s spiritual musing… 

I was born into a Roman Catholic family in Calabria, Italy, so I grew up believing in Jesus; but I was also the black sheep of my family, and I had an inordinate curiosity that I sought to satisfy with voracious reading. In grade eight I read one book a day, and when I turned fifteen I ordered an encyclopedic set of books called The Great Books of the Western World, with two sets of companion literature to compliment the Great Books; but my older brother had to sign for me to purchase them because I paid for them on monthly instalments. I worked three jobs—delivering newspapers after school, spotting pins in the bowling alley, and working at the Bay Grocery Store on weekends—and I never missed a payment.

Inevitably all of my reading opened me up to the world and other teachings, and I began to question my Roman Catholic faith; but I had no idea how dogmatic and rigid it was until I stared face to face with the concept of eternal damnation. How could one mortal sin, like eating meat on Friday, be equal to an eternity of hellfire?

That was cruel and unfair, and I didn’t believe God would do that to us; and that’s how I began to question my faith and look for answers to my soul-consuming Christian doubt. And then I read Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge in high school, and I became a seeker like Maugham’s hero Larry Darrel; and I left my faith and the rest is history.

That was a long, long time ago. In fact, it was so long ago that it feels like another lifetime; and when I look back on my life today I can’t believe how far I’ve come in my quest for answers to life’s imponderable questions. And it’s only because I found answers to these haunting questions—which can be summed up in Paul Gaugin’s famous painting, Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?—that I dare to write a spiritual musing on the question of belief that was inspired by the Christian movie Do you Believe?

For the longest time I had disturbing issues with Christianity; so much so, in fact, that I went way out of my way to resolve them, which, thankfully I did and wrote about in my novel Healing with Padre Pio (followed up with Why Bother? The Riddle of the Good Samaritan, and The Pearl of Great Price); and, like Joni Mitchell’s song, “I’ve looked at life from both sides now” and am free to explore the question of belief without prejudice…

 

When all is said and done, if we don’t believe in something our life will inevitably become empty, meaningless, and absurd. Even if we believe that the sun is going to rise tomorrow, despite no definite scientific proof that it will, we live in hope; and hope is what the Christian movie Do You Believe? is all about—hope for something better.

The Cross of Jesus, of course, is the focal point of one’s hope in this movie, because Jesus died on the cross for our salvation.; and we all need salvation from something—from poverty, like the young pregnant woman in the movie, from life on the streets like the mother and her young daughter, freedom from crippling grief for an older couple from the tragic loss of their daughter to a drunk driver, salvation from a life of crime for a young black man, freedom from extreme prejudice for a money-motivated lawyer, freedom from the god-complex for the non-believing doctor, and salvation for Kriminal for his unconscionable life of crime, to name some of the storylines in the movie; and had I not been objective enough to see both sides of life, I would have thought Do You Believe? to be a sappy, ridiculous movie out to proselytize all the non-believers.

Instead, I came away feeling good that there are people in the world that will go out of their way to help others, because it emboldened my faith in human nature; and despite the movie’s syrupy Christian bias, I know now that it’s not what we believe that matters, but what our beliefs have made of us, and regardless of what I think of Christianity today, as long as it encourages people to be good that’s all that matters to me. 

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23: The Hedgehog Knows One Big Thing

23 

The Hedgehog Knows One Big Thing 

Just for fun and out of intellectual curiosity, the renowned Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote an essay inspired by one line attributed to the ancient Greek poet Archilochus who died in 645 BC: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Isaiah’s essay, published in book form as The Hedgehog and the Fox, is both enlightening and entertaining; and just for the fun of it, I’d like to explore his application of the hedgehog/fox metaphor to my own writing in today’s spiritual musing… 

I hadn’t heard of Isaiah Berlin’s book The Hedgehog and the Fox until a month or so ago when Colin Wilson made reference to it in his talk with Jeffrey Mishlove on his program Thinking Allowed, and I knew immediately what Colin Wilson meant when he said that he belonged to the category of hedgehog writers, because that’s how I saw myself also.

“I’ve written the same book seventy times over,” said Colin Wilson; which put him squarely in the hedgehog camp of writers, because according to Isaiah Berlin hedgehog writers focus on one all-embracing idea for understanding life. They possess a “…central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel—a single, universal, organizing principle.” And for Colin Wilson that one all-consuming central preoccupation was, in Jeffery Mishlove’s words, “reconciling this issue of the heights of consciousness and the depths of despair.”

Berlin made no huge claims for his hedgehog/fox metaphor, calling it a “starting-point for genuine investigation,” with the added benefit of being an “enjoyable intellectual game” by which one could classify writers and thinkers into either camp, as he did by placing Plato, Dante, Pascal, Proust, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and many other classical writers into the hedgehog camp; and Aristotle, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Goethe, and  Joyce among others in the fox camp of writers and thinkers, but focusing his attention upon Tolstoy.

According to Berlin’s application of the metaphor, fox writers pursue many ends, often unrelated, “seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experience and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing…unitary vision.”

In short, Berlin defined a hedgehog writer as someone who relates everything to a single vision, an organizing principle that seems to cover all of history, or a single dynamic of polar opposites like Colin Wilson’s lifelong study of the depths and heights of human consciousness; and a fox writer, on the other hand pursues many ideas, not necessarily related, and often contradictory, like the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy.

Two camps, two types of writers; and according to this hedgehog/fox classification, I’m definitely a hedgehog writer because I have pursued one central idea my whole life; an idée fixe which can be summed up by the simple question, WHO AM I?

This became my organizing principle, and everything I did in my life was colored by my efforts to find the answer to this haunting question. I didn’t talk about it openly, because this would have been a foolish thing to do, unless one was Shirley MacLaine who confessed in I’m Over all That, “no matter where I went I was always looking for myself” and always brought it up in interviews simply to expand social self-awareness; but whether one talks about it or not everyone will one day ask the question, WHO AM I? 

There were many things in my life that I longed for, and many avenues that I wanted to explore; but because of my hedgehog preoccupation, I focused my attention on what I felt would help me answer my haunting question. So I was fox-like by inclination, because of my many interests; but I was a hedgehog by instinct, because I had to find my true self.

This caused me considerable anxiety, because I couldn’t have it both ways; until I made a commitment one day and vowed to find my true self or die trying. And the more I focused on my idée fixe, the more laser-like attention I brought to my quest; which confirmed Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog/fox metaphor, because the hedgehog writer would be better disposed to a deeper insight into his preoccupying single interest than the fox writer who has many interests, because the hedgehog writer is by instinct a centripetal thinker (tending to move toward a center), and the fox writer is a centrifugal thinker (tending to move away from a center); but whether hedgehog or fox, both types  play out life’s drama of becoming who they are according to their own nature, thereby fulfilling their essential purpose in life.

Of course, this presupposes that life has an essential purpose; but it was because of my hedgehog conviction that I managed to answer the question WHO AM I? which granted me an insight into life’s essential purpose of realizing our true self, as I articulated in The Pearl of Great Price that tells the story of my self-discovery.

 But this is a personal realization, and I don’t expect the world to see it; because, as Gurdjieff used to say, “There is only self-initiation into the mysteries of life,” and the only way to confirm that our purpose in life is to become our true self would be to initiate oneself into the sacred mystery. This is what the ancient alchemists meant when they said, “Man must finish the work which Nature has left incomplete.”

I’m glad that I was born to be a hedgehog, then; because it compelled me to devote my life to finding my true self and write about my journey, and as many regrets as I may have for not satisfying the longings of my many interests (I’d still love to be a Jungian therapist specializing in past-life regression therapy), I’ve accomplished what I came into this world to do; and I couldn’t ask for more. 

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22: Cloud Cuckoo Land

22 

Cloud Cuckoo Land 

I couldn’t quite conceptualize my insight as I tried to explain to Penny what I felt about the Muslim immigrant who refused to take off her niqab during the oath-taking ceremony for her Canadian citizenship, which I personally felt to be an idiosyncratic and foolish thing to do; but it was much more than that. It went deeper, but I couldn’t put my feelings about this woman’s religious convictions into words; and I said to Penny, “I don’t know how to express what I feel about this woman. She’s stuck in her own world, but it’s much more than that—”

Just then, as life would have it, I heard someone on the radio (we were driving into Midland to do some grocery shopping) say two words that expressed exactly what I felt about the recalcitrant Muslim woman—“delusional grandeur.”

“That’s it!” I exclaimed. “That’s it exactly! She’s deluded in her grandeur!”

We both laughed at the timely coincidence of  the radio providing the exact words that I needed at precisely that moment to conceptualize what I was feeling about that Muslim woman—which was not uncommon for me, because the omniscient guiding force of life has often provided answers this way; but I have to explain the phrase “delusional grandeur” in the context of my thoughts on the woman who risked her Canadian citizenship because of her religious convictions, and that’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing… 

According to my sidebar dictionary, delusional means “suffering from or characterized by delusions,” and delusion means “the act of deluding; deception by creating illusory ideas.” And grandeur means “the quality of elevation of mind and exaltation of character or ideals or conduct.” And together I took “delusional grandeur” to mean that the Muslim woman’s religious convictions had deluded her sense of self-importance enough to risk her Canadian citizenship for the sake of wearing her niqab during the oath-taking ceremony; and for me that was the kind of behavior straight out of cloud cuckoo land.

Cloud cuckoo land has many denizens, and I know one when I see one because I also sleep-walked my way through cloud cuckoo land lost in the fantasy world of my own mind for years before I woke up to myself, as did my personal hero Carl Gustav Jung who had the courage to confess his own “lost years” in one of his private letters that I first read about in Claire Dunne’s biography, Carl Jung, Wounded Healer of the Soul.

"The journey from cloud cuckoo land to reality lasted a long time. In my case Pilgrim’s Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am," wrote Jung in his letter, alluding to his “psychotic breakdown” after he severed his professional and personal relationship with his colleague and mentor Sigmund Freud, which brought on his “confrontation with the unconscious” that he recorded in his “black notebooks” that he later transcribed into The Red Book.

Cloud cuckoo land is an illusory domain of the mind, and a very strange place to be because it is unrealistic and impractical, a fantasy world where everything is possible; and not unlike Plato’s allegory of the cave where the  denizen prisoners have their own sense of reality which they believe to be normal, so does every denizen of cloud cuckoo land take their sense of reality to be perfectly normal too, like the Pakistani woman who risked her golden opportunity to become a citizen of a democratically open and free society because she had convinced herself that not wearing her niqab during the oath-swearing part of her Canadian citizenship ceremony was a betrayal of her Muslim faith and personal identity; but to someone who has awakened from cloud cuckoo land, these strange people are all afflicted with the same strain of mental virus characterized by “delusional grandeur” that Gurdjieff alluded to when he said that people go through life in a state of “hypnotic sleep.”

I grew up in a state of “hypnotic sleep,” because I believed in mortal sin and salvation in heaven and eternal damnation in hell. This was my sense of reality, which I inherited from my southern Italian Roman Catholic family; and if I died in a state of mortal sin, like eating meat on Friday or missing Sunday Mass, without saying a perfect act of contrition before dying I was going straight to hell, and that terrified me growing up.

But I began to question my faith in my early teens, and I discovered reincarnation a few years later; and my personal reality began to change as I explored this strange new belief system of dying and coming back to live life over again.

And then in high school between grades nine and twelve I had four past-life recollection dreams that were so real that I could not deny that it was me. I was a North American Indian in one past lifetime; a black slave in southern Georgia in another; a fishmonger in London, England; and I was also a statesman in ancient Athens; and these dream recollections of my past lives induced me to look deeper into the Eastern teaching of reincarnation, which introduced me to the principle of personal accountability called karma. And this threw my life into turmoil, because the rigid reality of my Roman Catholic world collided with my new reality of karma and reincarnation, and for the longest time I floundered in confusion.

Like my hero C. G. Jung, I also had to climb down a thousand ladders from cloud cuckoo land to step out of the delusory world passed on to me by my family and society (compounded by my own private delusions that I created by escaping into the fantasy world of my own making, which were fueled by the irrepressible Kundalini energy that I had unleashed when I accidentally opened up the chakra at the base of my spine and awakened the “sleeping serpent” while meditating one evening in Annecy, France in my early twenties); but my descent out of cloud cuckoo land began with my first step down the ladder to my true self when I questioned my Roman Catholic faith for the first time when I was twelve.

I remember it like yesterday. It was a Saturday afternoon in the summer, and I had just gone to confession so I could take Holy Communion Sunday morning; but as I was walking up Newton Street in my hometown of Nipigon after my confession, a thought struck me out of the blue that God wasn’t being fair. In one simple but dramatic image, it came clear to me that there was something wrong with the whole notion of sin and eternal damnation: I held up my hands, palms upward in front of me like two scales of justice, and on one hand I placed one mortal sin committed in a moment of time, and on the palm of my other hand I placed eternal damnation in hell, and I felt the weight of eternal damnation sink down and down and down, and I cried out, “That’s not fair! How can one mortal sin committed in a moment of time be equal to punishment in hell for all eternity? That’s not right! God wouldn’t do that!” And from that moment on I began to slip away from the “delusional grandeur” of my Roman Catholic faith and became a nascent seeker. 

Being an inspired writer with a natural bent for Socratic reasoning (a carryover from my lifetime as a student of Pythagoras), I cannot help but see the Muslim woman’s religious conviction that her niqab is part of her personal identity as an absurd anachronism no less delusional than my youthful Catholic conviction that my faith had the power to condemn me to eternal punishment in hell for eating meat on Friday which, incidentally, the Roman Catholic Church erased from its dogma years later.

So it’s not a mortal sin today for Roman Catholics to eat meat on Friday, and the essential tenets of the Catholic faith have not crumbled, which only illustrates the “delusional grandeur” of a religious faith that can change its reality according to its fancy; and the same can be said of the much more dogmatic Muslim faith which can be reduced to the simple attire of a woman’s niqab. And in my mind’s eye I see that Muslim woman walking down a street in Mississauga with her hands in front of her, palms upward like two scales of justice; and in one palm she has placed her niqab, and in the other her citizenship papers for a country that will grant her the freedom to pursue her heart’s desires; and I see the hand holding her niqab outweigh the freedom of her Canadian citizenship, and I feel like crying at the absurdity of her religions conviction. Doesn’t she know that Stupidity Is Not a Gift of God?

But it is her life, and she too will be called one day to step down the ladder of cloud cuckoo land when she can no longer suffer the oppressive burden of her “delusional grandeur,” because, as the old saying goes, “If we don’t get it right in this lifetime, we will just keep coming back until we do.” And true or not, this is my reality today.

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