33: Shadow Masters

33 

Shadow Masters 

“Man’s shadow, I thought, is his vanity.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

While working on my new book The Man of God Walks Alone—a literary exercise in what Carl Jung called “active imagination”—I was introduced to the concept of Shadow Masters by St. Padre Pio, who may or may not be an archetypal manifestation of my unconscious; and so acutely conscious did I become of these false teachers from intimate personal experience that I was prompted by my Muse to explore this concept of Shadow Masters in today’s spiritual musing, though admittedly under protest…

 

Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher who said that we cannot step into the same river twice, believed that life is always in a state of flux and is forever being transformed; and from this perspective was born Carl Jung’s understanding of enantiodromia, the concept that everything will in time turn into its opposite, which gave birth to Jung’s psychology of individuation whose ultimate purpose is to integrate the conflicting shadow side of our psychic self with our conscious ego personality, or what Jesus called “salvation.”

The word “salvation” has a lot of baggage, but if one is fortunate enough to break the code of Christ’s teaching and catch a glimpse of the secret way one will see that by “salvation” Jesus simply meant breaking the cycle of life and death by transcending the dual consciousness of our personality, which Jesus referred to as making the two into one as he tells us in The Unknown Sayings of Jesus, by Marvin Meyer: “For when the master himself was asked by someone when the kingdom would come, he said, ‘When the two will be one, and the outer like the inner, and the male with the female neither male nor female.’”

This is the mystical nature of the process of individuation that Carl Jung devoted his life to understanding and expounded upon in his magnum opus Mysterium Coniunctionis, but try as he may he could not break the code of how to facilitate the mystical marriage of our inner and outer self and only brought us to the gateway of the kingdom of our true self; but Gurdjieff knew the secret way, and with Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself” I integrated my shadow self with my conscious personality and realized my transcendent self in my mother’s kitchen one day while she was kneading bread dough on the kitchen table.

So I can speak with the confidence of gnostic certainty about the secret way, and it behoves me now to shed some light on this concept of Shadow Masters that pass themselves off as genuine Spiritual Masters, and so effectively I may add that they can entrap the keenest of seekers in the seductive web of their deception as I have already illustrated in my spiritual musing “The Parable of the Packages.” But why? What drives them to deceive?

That’s the mystery of Shadow Masters that I’ve been called upon to unravel; but so confounding is this mystery that I have no choice but to declare my ignorance, and I’m obliged to call upon my Muse for assistance— 

“What’s my point of entry?”

“The becoming of man’s nature.”

 “The being and non-being of our becoming?”

“One cannot exist without the other.”

“All I know is that to be, we must become; and to become we have to transform the false into the real. That’s the only way we can make the two into one. So what’s the purpose of a Shadow Master whose imperative is to keep soul trapped in one’s shadow?”

“Aye, there’s the rub!”

“You tease me.”

“If I may, wherein lies the proof of the pudding?”

“In the experience.”

“Well?”

“I loved the pudding at first, but the more I ate the less I liked it; and then the pudding gave me indigestion, and I had to walk away from the table: the first time with an offshoot Christian solar cult that did irreparable damage to my eyesight, and recently with a new age teaching of the Light and Sound of God that gravely wounded my swollen pride when I learned that the founder of this teaching was a fraudulent mythologizer.”

“One must eat the shadow to taste the shadow—”

“STOP! I’ve got it! Shadow Masters serve shadow pudding!”

“They too serve the Creator.”

“What irony! Okay, I can take it from here…” 

Shadow pudding? What on earth is that? That’s the mystery, isn’t it? But how else can we know the real unless we get our fill of the false? And that’s the Shadow Master’s divine mission, to serve us shadow pudding until we get sick of shadow pudding; but just what is this shadow pudding that tastes so good to the innocent seeker’s palate?

For over thirty years I feasted on the shadow pudding of a new age teaching of the Light and Sound of God, but when I had my fill of shadow pudding I began to get indigestion every time I dined at the Shadow Master’s table; and then one night I had a dream that broke the spell that this Shadow Master had upon his followers, and I stopped eating shadow pudding and walked away from the Master’s table. Hence, today’s spiritual musing.

In Meeting the Shadow, The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature, editors Connie Sweig and Jeremiah Abrams wrote: “However, for most participants in the new age, the shadow has been conspicuous by its absence. Seekers are often led to believe that, with the right teacher and the right practice, they can transcend to higher levels of awareness without dealing with their more petty vices or ugly emotional attachments. As Colorado journalist Marc Barasch puts it: ‘Spirituality, as repackaged for the new age, is a confection of love and light, purified of pilgrimage and penance, of defeat and descent, of harrowing and humility’” (Meeting the Shadow, p. 130).

“Purified of pilgrimage and penance,” that’s the sweet ingredient of shadow pudding that appeals to the seeker’s palate, just as Christianity’s shadow pudding of instant salvation through Jesus Christ without the purifying effort of pilgrimage and penance, which belies the law of spiritual growth through the conscious effort of integrating the unconscious shadow with the ego personality—dying to one’s life to find one’s life, as Jesus said.

In short, there are no shortcuts into the kingdom of one’s true self, and shadow pudding feeds the shadow and starves the soul with vacuous truisms like “You are Soul” and “Soul exists because God loves you” that eliminate all the penance of our becoming.

Without the purifying pilgrimage and penance of our becoming, we will never become conscious of our true spiritual nature; but Shadow Masters are relentless, and they will do whatever it takes to keep followers dining at their sumptuous table; like using fear to ensure obedience.

“What makes me sick at heart? When people I know and love decide to leave (his TEACHING, which he claims to be the most direct path to God). That will delay their entry into the highest states of consciousness,” wrote the Shadow Master in his quarterly letter to High Initiates, threatening those who leave his TEACHING of the Light and Sound of God that I walked away from after thirty years of dining at his table; and though I have a lingering sour taste in my mouth from all the shadow pudding that I ate, especially the subliminal fear that he implanted in my mind with sugar-coated kindness that salvation was not possible without his inner and outer guidance, I still want to thank him for his spiritual teaching which took me through the far country of duplicity and brought me back home to reality, because now I know that Shadow Masters are only as real as we allow them to be. In the words of St. Padre Pio, “Life is a journey of growth and understanding.” 

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