Know Your Own Shadow

I have talked about the demon, the daimon or our shadow and how it may unconsciously wreak havoc in our lives and in the lives of others without our knowing about how it works,without our being aware of it. We now know that the shadow, the darkness which is ours, is something or someone we cannot escape but which is something most difficult to contact because it is by nature elusive as it is the reflection of ourselves when there is no light. But surely the important thing is to get to know what that shadow in ourselves may look like. If we do not, we shall have no way of dealing with it.

In the article "Writing About the Other" Deena Metzger skteches for us her way of helping us to get to grips with our own shadow. Metzger begins with something very obvious: "to contact the shadow, we must be willing to go into the dark, for that is where it lives." We must learn to build a partnership with our shadow because if we do not, we run the risk of its coming to us in a furtive and violent manner. Yet in coming towards it, we may have to face the risk of being engulfed by it. In the dark, we often feel as if we ourselves are the dark, that we have become that darkness. Yet there is no other way. We must learn what our shadow looks like. Our shadow is our other face, a secret self, the dark side of our soul, our psyche.

How then do we meet our own shadow? First, we must concede that there are parts of ourselves that we consider absolutely foreign and alien, something we abhor, we disdain, something we deny. But we must admit that these parts, horrific as they are, are still part of ourselves. Our conscious self and our unconscious shadow form a continuum. To access it, we need to first of all to show to the shadow that we are no longer hostile to it. We must be friendly to our own darkness before it may be encouraged to reveal itself further to us. We must offer it our olive branch.

We all know that the shadow lengthens with sunset, as the night approaches. The sun is our reason. If we wish the shadow to emerge, first we must for the sake of encouraging the shadow to emerge from the darkness, hide itself for a while and stop the sharpness of its analytic sword, as the rays of sunlight dull and blur the sharpness of its edges as the sun dims in the twilight. We must stop thinking. We must learn to be aware when our brain is working and gently bid it to slow down, to stop before the shadow will reveal itself.

Next, Metzger asks us to ask ourselves calmly but honestly a series of probing questions: What are those qualities or attributes in "others" that we find least like ourselves? Who hates us most? What are our own most intractable prejudices? With what kind of people we find ourselves the least comfortable? With what kind of people we feel the least affinity?What kind of people revolt, offend, terrify or enrage us? What kind of people we consider "beneath" us? What kind of behavior we find "grotesque"? Under what kind of circumstances would we feel too humiliated to continue  living? What kind of horror within ourselves would we find most unbearable? We must write down our answers. After we have done that, we may find that some of such aversions are based on moral or ethical judgement and that many of them will fill us with repugnance, contempt, loathing, revulsion and nausea. These are all part of our shadow.  They live within our shadow.

Then what we do is that we allow a character to formulate itself: someone with a name, a personality, a history. We must know where she lives, what her house looks like, what she eats for lunch, what she thinks, what she fears, what she wants, dreams about etc. If one is called Peter, we call him Peter II. We must be friendly with Peter II and ask him as a bosom friend everything we want to know about him and enter into a dialogue with him. The idea is to get a psychological or personality sketch of him.

Another method suggested by Metzger to enable what our shadow looks like is for us to "imagine" that our life is threatened. To escape, we must create another identity, a false cover. The cover must be perfect. It must be so like ourselve and yet so different that we can be perfectly disguised while living the life of this our double. Who is this character we become to disguise ourselves and thereby save our own life? We imagine ourselves invisible and follow through every moment of that alter ego's day or week, and observe him/her alone and with others. What does this other character think when unable to sleep at 3 a.m. in the morning. What secrets, griefs, insights are we privy to? What essential part of ourselves is covered by this persona? In thus questioning and probing and discovering this other "self", we must be curious about everything but we must be careful not to make any judgment, nor to criticize him or her. We must do our best not to allow our own personal biases and fears to contaminate or to destroy the observation and revelations that occur.

After we have completed this second step, we will have a fair idea of what our shadow looks like. This shadow is our sibling, born of the same parents. Then we must go on to write down what our relationship with this sibling is. We must project ourselves imaginatively into the past, when we were still friendly with this other self, this Peter II. We then ask when the two parted company and started pursuing different lives. Imagine ourselves to be our own parents reminiscing about each of these two parts of ourselves, talking about their differences and similarities.

Finally, Metzger asks us to allow this sibling, this other, this enemy, this cover to look back at our present self. Allow this character to speak to us in his or her own voice and to create a portrait of us. From this other perspective, how do we look? As the other has developed a voice, enter into dialogue with each other. What is it you each want to know?

The shadow whose outlines and personality sketch thus created is in fact a part of ourself. It has always been with us. It is in fact not separate from us. We can now look at this other character from both sides, from the inside and from the outside. Metzger says that there is this irony " the one with whom you have created an island of communality and mutual understanding is utterly other and the one who is utterly other is the one whom you can understand perfectly". Then we are asked to imagine ourselves living the other's life and finally imagine the death of the shadow self. How does that shadow die, given the kind of personality that it has?

To Metzger, the shadow never dies. We always cast a shadow. The important thing is how we relate to it. Once it is known, we have inevitably lost an innocence that can never be recovered. "What replaces it is a knowledge of the complexity of our nature.". She says, "in the end, what remains is what we can only come to know, when we are alone, naked, and the light is behind us." She ends the article with a poem by Wendell Berry:

                   I go among trees and sit still.

                   All my stirring becomes quiet

                   around me like circles on water.

                   My tasks lie in their places

                   where I left them, asleep like cattle.

                   Then what is afraid of me comes

                   and lives a while in my sight.

                   What it fears in me leaves me,

                    and the fear of me leaves it. 

                    It sings, and I hear its song.

                    

                     Then what I am afraid comes,

                     I live for a while in its light.

                     What I fear in it leaves it

                     and the fear of it leaves me.

                     It sings, and I hear its song.

If we want our lives to be whole, we must become friends with our own shadow. We must respect its right to its own life.  We do not attack our friends. We try to know our friends. We try to understand our friends. When our friends are in a temper, we try to calm them down. That's all. Is that it?