Several people requested a hard copy of Jody Bower’s talk from March 1. Here it is . . .

Spirit, the Shadow, and Soul

This year in Unity we are following the theme of Spirit Rising. That’s what Spirit does: Spirit rises. It takes us up to the higher realm, gives us the “higher self” perspective where we see that all is love and all is One.

The quantum physicists say everything is both a particle and a wave – both individual and part of the Whole. We are all part of Spirit – but we are also each an individual soul simultaneously. 

Soul descends. Soul takes us down to where we feel our individuality, our aloneness, our uniqueness. Out of that individuality, that uniqueness, we can bring something new to Spirit.

On the other side, we know our oneness all the time. But bodies are dense (in more than one way). When a soul gets into a body, we become separate. It’s hard for us to communicate with each other in these dense bodies. So we develop a psyche to mediate between soul & the physical world. The psyche too is one thing and many things at the same time. It’s made up of layers. There’s the conscious self, the subconscious, and the unconscious.

The conscious self is like the tip of the iceberg that’s above water. In the conscious self there is the rational self (logos), the decision-making logical part of us. Then there’s the emotional or passionate self (eros), and the ego, which I’ll talk a lot more about in a minute. In addition there is the Self with a capital S, the Self that knows it is not the ego, not the emotional self, not the rational self. Some call it the higher self, some call it the observer. It is through this Self that we connect to Spirit.

We tend to think of the ego as bad. It’s true the ego trips us up a lot. But that’s because the ego’s job is to protect the body. I think of ego as an overprotective mother always warning “oh, don’t do that – you could get hurt!” The ego does not want us to get hurt, because hurt is dangerous to the body. We need the ego, or chances are we’d die way too soon. But the ego is prone to seeing danger where there is none. Also, the ego can’t tell the difference between physical hurt and emotional hurt. It thinks that if you take an emotional risk, you could die! If we listened only to the ego we’d never take any risks. So there’s a tension we have to keep, a balance, between overcautiousness and recklessness.

The next layer down is the subconscious. By the way, the only reason we use the words “subconscious” or “unconscious” for the other parts of our psyche is because the ego doesn’t want to admit they are there. It’s the ego that wants to be unconscious!

The subconscious part of the psyche is the underwater part of the iceberg. The subconscious is the buffer zone between the conscious and the unconscious. I think of it as kind of a storage unit, the basement or attic where we can store stuff we don’t need right now. See, all our lives we make decisions about what kind of person we think we are. And any part of us that doesn’t fit that self-image gets shoved in the subconscious. Which can be the bad stuff we don’t want to own up to, but it also can be positive aspects we’re afraid to claim for some reason. DH Lawrence says that most people are afraid to step into their true nobility. We make other people into the heroes so we don’t have to take action. But there’s heroism in all of us. If we never let that inner hero out, life becomes small and bitter.

These things the ego doesn’t want to look at make up our shadow.  Carl Jung tells a great story about a dream he had where he was running through a foggy night. He was holding a tiny candle cupped in his hands and being chased by something huge and dark and scary. When he woke up, he realized the scary thing was his own shadow on the mist caused by the light from his candle. If he’d only stopped and turned around – and this is possibly the bravest thing a person can ever do – he would have seen it was just a shadow, and not been scared at all.

Most people are too afraid to turn around. They just keep running. Running away from the shadow often takes the form of distracting yourself with work or some other obsession, or by numbing yourself out somehow with alcohol or drugs or food. But the best way, the one the ego likes best, is to disclaim all responsibility. The ego would much rather say “it’s not me, it’s that other guy that is making that dark scary thing.” How much of politics can be boiled down to “it’s not us, it’s those other guys?”

We can know more about what causes our shadow by our emotional reactions to others or to situations. The more we can look honestly at our own reactions and expectations and take ownership of them, the less power the shadow will have to frighten us.

We talk a lot about “lessons” in Unity. Whenever we face a challenge to the body or the feelings, it’s a “lesson.” We’re supposed to learn a higher truth from it. And that’s absolutely true. A lot of our challenges come out of the shadow, and if we can own the shadow, it will become easier and easier for us to operate out of the higher Self than the ego. Relationships are the best place to do shadow work, because the persons we love are usually carrying some shadow stuff for us and vice versa. Most of the fights that occur in families have are caused by the shadow. So there’s a great opportunity there!

But even if we work very hard at owning it, the shadow will always be a part of us. We’ll always have stuff that we want to pretend isn’t there. And it’s important – it’s vital in fact – to honor that. To acknowledge that we each have a shadow. And every group has a shadow too. Church brings up a lot of shadow stuff for me. The expectations are so high here to live from Spirit, to always see each other without shadow. And the brighter the light, the stronger the shadow. Rev. Pam and I have been talking about this, and we’ve decided to make the topic for the third quarter Soul Journey Circle the shadow and how to own it and honor it.

Next layer down of the psyche is the unconscious. Think of the unconscious as the ocean the iceberg floats in. Again, it’s not really “unconscious” to us. Here is where the soul lives in us. And we’re all connected at that level too. Jung called it the collective unconscious. Soul talks to us all the time, not just our individual souls but the Soul of all of us. But because it’s another step removed from consciousness, the clues are harder to decipher. Soul speaks in symbols, and we can only hear it when circumstances are right. Usually we need to perform a ritual, do something that puts us in the right space to listen. The easiest method, the one we all do, is to go to sleep. When we sleep the conscious mind is out of the way, and the soul can talk to us in dreams. But like I said, it speaks in symbols. It doesn’t speak English very often – if you wake up remembering specific words, chances are it’s a pun or a metaphor. The soul loves puns. So learning how to read the symbolic language of dreams can be a very powerful thing. A great book is Robert Johnson’s Inner Work. Working with a depth psychologist or Jungian psychologist is another way. After a while of such work you’ll get pretty sophisticated about your own dream language, and you’ll get good messages, good guidance from your soul and that greater Soul.

Meditation is another way to listen to soul. Again, you do a ritual – a mantra or a visualization – that helps you put all those busy thoughts out of the way so you can hear your soul and know what it wants.

What does the soul want? This is probably not going to be a surprise: the soul wants exactly what ego fears. Soul does not care about the body. The body, to the soul, is just the clothes it threw on when it came to the physical plane. Soul does not care if these clothes get all ripped up and dirty. Soul loves making mud pies. Soul loves exploring dark dangerous places. Also, soul does not care about feelings. It is interested in feelings, but it doesn’t judge them as good or bad; they’re all equally valid to soul. But the intense ones are more interesting. Soul loves tension. Soul loves conflict. Soul loves misery.

Soul loves pain.

Rumi says:

Oh brother, the place of darkness and cold
Is the fountain of Life and the cup of Ecstasy
So also is endurance of pain, sickness, and disease

Bernie Siegel, who wrote Love, Medicine & Miracles, is an oncologist who works with cancer patients. If you ever get a chance to hear him speak, go – he’s marvelous. He says that almost all his patients tell him “you know, I wouldn’t wish this experience on anyone, but I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.” They’ve learned something valuable from their pain.

Anyone here ever have “a dark night of the soul”? Not fun, eh? Did you grow from that? Yes. Soul just loves those dark nights.

Michael Meade said “I know this for sure: you never become authentic by being given a task that is easy.”

Soul challenges are not the same as shadow challenges. Soul challenges have to do with karma and with agreements we have with other souls and with our soul’s own agenda for what it wants to accomplish in this life. We can’t avoid these challenges no matter how good we are with shadow work. We can’t avoid them by positive thinking, by affirmations and denials. They happen no matter what we do, because soul wants them. It’s the only way the soul can grow.

And the only reason we are here at all is so the soul can grow. That’s why we take birth. That’s the hard truth. We aren’t here to live in the light and the flow all the time. We do that on the other side! When we come here, it’s to grow our souls.

It’s a wave and a particle. Each soul, your soul, my soul – is part of Spirit, part of God, the Tao, Creation, whatever you want to call it. Spirit consists of all our individual souls. So when we grow, Spirit grows too. When one of us learns anything, we all learn. When one of us grows our soul, that greater Soul also grows.

But we do soul work, it’s usually lonely, and dark, and cold, and painful. So we need, from time to time, to climb up to the top of the tree and get perspective, to rise up and remember we’re all part of Spirit and it is okay. That’s what we do here at Unity. We rise up out of the darkness of soul work when we need some light to see by. Psalm 119 (105): “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.” The more we do soul work, the more we need a regular dose of Spirit. I’m betting most of the people here are doing some intense soul work, that’s why Unity is so necessary to us. We need the perspective of Spirit.

Rarely, the soul and Spirit will speak at the same time. That’s what happens if you have an epiphany, a vision, an enlightenment experience. My take on the Christ, on the Buddha, on Lao-Tse and Sri Krishna, the great teachers, is they touched soul and spirit together all the time. And their message to us is that it can be done, that we can do it!

But honestly, most of us can only get brief glimpses of this Truth. We’re down in the depths of Soul most of the time. Jung said “it seems that every ascent must be preceded by a descent. We have to go down before we can rise up.

Even Jesus lost sight of Spirit in the garden at Gethsemane when He asked God to “let this cup pass from me,” and again on the Cross – His dark night of the soul – when He thought God had forsaken Him. And if Jesus couldn’t always hold on to His awareness of Spirit, we shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves when we lose sight of Spirit and despair.

So we bounce between being aware of Spirit and feeling like we’re down in the depths of Soul all our lives. Our best course is to learn how to hold these opposites of Spirit and Soul in tension. This tension is essential to soul growth. Rilke said

Take your well-disciplined strengths
and stretch them between two
opposing poles. Because inside human beings
is where God learns.

Thomas Moore talks more about this in Care of the Soul. When we are in a quandary or a difficult place and don’t know what to do, he says: don’t act. Don’t choose. In time an answer will appear that is new, that we hadn’t seen before, and is the right one. In the meantime, soul is growing. So in a painful time where you don’t know what to do – stay there as long as you can. Explore it. Feel it. Watch your dreams. Meditate. Come to church or read something inspirational or do something for a dose of Spirit when you can’t bear to stay in the depths any longer. Sooner or later the still small voice that David talked about last week will speak and tell you something important: a choice you hadn’t seen before, or an insight into why soul is taking you through this hard time.

Jung said this beautifully in a letter to a friend, written late in his life:

There can be no resolution, only patient endurance of the opposites which ultimately spring from your own nature. You yourself are a conflict that rages in itself and against itself, in order to melt its incompatible substances . . . in the fire of suffering, and thus create that fixed and unalterable form which is the goal of life. Everyone goes through this mill, consciously or unconsciously, voluntarily or forcibly. We are crucified between the opposites and delivered up to the torture until the “reconciling third” takes place. Do not doubt the rightness of the two sides within you, and let whatever may happen, happen. The apparently unendurable conflict is proof of the rightness of your life. A life without contradiction is either only half a life or else a life in the Beyond, which is destined only for angels. But God loves human beings more than the angels.