Have you ever tried to explain contradictions to young children? As they try to make sense of a confusingly complex world, they search for shapes and boundaries. They want to know where one thing or idea begins, and where it ends.

When the boundaries are violated, when children see contradictions, [...]]]>

Have you ever tried to explain contradictions to young children? As they try to make sense of a confusingly complex world, they search for shapes and boundaries. They want to know where one thing or idea begins, and where it ends.

When the boundaries are violated, when children see contradictions, like the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes they ask.

Some of these contradictions are us being inconsistent, a black and white contradiction, for example where our actions don’t match our beliefs and words.

But then there are situations and ideas where black and white fade away, and something entirely different shows up.

We like to pretend that the world is black and white, opposites are completely distinct, and I can choose one side without the other. But it’s not usually so.

If we hate violence, can we face the possibility that there is a situation where we may have to stand up and protect what is precious, even if this means confronting others (whether it’s with powerful emotions or physical action, and even in rare instances, violent action)?

The point here is not to erase all boundaries and distinctions, or to deny the existence of evil.

The point is to admit that we live in a world of opposites. I need to recognize that I am an extraordinarily complex being, and that I need to explore who am I and be open to learning and change.

I’m a great believer in simplicity. I love people who want to express themselves clearly, without unnecessary jargon.

But some things are complex. When we try to oversimplify who we are, we may end up discarding the greatness that waits for us.

And uncovering our greatness begins with accepting the reality of who we are right now, our moments of greatness, and our foolishness.

From that place of honesty and truth we can explore the lessons of the neglected and discarded sides of ourselves, and find a way to reveal, purify, and reconcile those opposite parts of ourselves.

Can we even consider that the truth for us may be some synthesis or reconciliation of what we initially think are absolute opposites? It seems so unlikely at first.

We assume that what we need to do is to get rid of some part of us that we view as absolutely negative. But typically we need to find a way to live with the opposites, and find an aspect of every tendency, every behavior which we can use to become greater and to build up the world.

What will such honesty do to my image of myself and others?
We like to pretend that we know each other, and that it’s simple to understand another person. The surface may be simple, but in the depths of my soul I’m complicated and wild.

And that’s where our greatness lies.

And that’s what can make our relationships with another person full of wonder, instead of dull habits based on the simple surface of the person that we can see.

What is a shadow? The everyday shadows we see come about when an object blocks a source of light. Not exactly a buzzworthy event!

Why all the fuss about shadows? There are so many legends and myths where shadows have magical properties, including magical creatures that have no shadow at [...]]]> What is a shadow?
The everyday shadows we see come about when an object blocks a source of light. Not exactly a buzzworthy event!

Why all the fuss about shadows? There are so many legends and myths where shadows have magical properties, including magical creatures that have no shadow at all.

In Jungian Psychology, the word shadow represents an important psychological concept. It speaks of vast unexplored parts of ourselves. When people hear of this concept of hidden parts of ourselves, they often think of a person’s dark side, where violence, endless anger, and hatred are waiting just out of sight.
(Take a look at Debbie Ford’s book, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers for an excellent discussion of the shadow.)
But Jung’s concept of the shadow is much richer than that. It includes the unwanted or unknown parts of ourselves, and there’s both a dark side and a golden side to this. There are parts of us that we’re afraid to face which may seem to be or actually be negative, but there are equally present golden parts of ourselves that can take us far beyond any dreams that we’ve dreamt of what we are capable of being.

The starting point of our exploration of the shadow is to see that we’re afraid of it, and that we’re denying it. As weird as it may sound at first hearing, we’re equally adept at denying our greatness, as we are at denying our weaknesses and inhumanity.

Another related concept that Jung introduces is an idea called projection. Simply put, if we find something distasteful OR extraordinary in others, there must be something in us similar to that.

This doesn’t mean that if we’re horrified by a story of a child molester that there’s a child molester lurking in us, or that if we enjoy the excellent performance of an athlete or musician that we’re secretly an Olympic athlete or rock star.

An exceptionally powerful reaction to a trait in another person may be a hint of something hidden away in us for good or bad that is distantly similar.

Sometimes it’s as simple as being able to notice in others, the negative traits or extraordinary potential in ourselves that we’re afraid to admit to. Everything in us has something to teach us, and even our “negative” traits have something to teach us if we can get past the urge to pretend that they don’t exist.

For example, if I’m angry all the time, is it a message that I’m missing something important in my life and I feel unsafe, and I have to strike out to protect myself? However distasteful, misshapen, twisted or destructive my behavior is, there’s likely something behind it that I need to understand. And as a starting point to getting at the truth, I have to admit to myself that it’s there.

Suppose I can’t find in myself even a hint of something in the world that I rightfully see as negative. Is there some opposite of it that we’ve neglected? If we passionately hate cruelty and violence, have we done everything possible to stand up to protect the victims of violence?

Maybe we have a hidden greatness and strength, which is the positive side or mirror image of the many things that we rightfully see as negative? Even our anger over trivial things might hide a strength that hasn’t found any other outlet.

When I was in high school, I’d occasionally go to a [...]]]> I’m not a big fan of horror stories or horror movies, but I’ve known many people who enjoyed them.
And people are often fascinated by the evil characters in other stories, like Darth Vader in the Star Wars movies.
Darth Vader fascinates me, too.

When I was in high school, I’d occasionally go to a really badly made horror movie with friends. The movie was so badly done, so fake, that the only appropriate response was laughter.

But that’s not what someone typically looks for in a horror movie.

Maybe you love the sense of relief, escape, or victory when some of the “good” guys escape from or conquer the monsters/bad guys.

But there’s something else.

Why do some people like the bad guys or monsters?

It may be frustration or unexpressed anger in someone’s life that’s released through the bad guy doing whatever he wants.

The key to the attraction is in those last few words: “doing whatever he wants.”

Sometimes we feel so unable to find a way to live what we want. We feel that most of what we want is always on hold for another day.

A tomorrow that never comes.

The monster or bad guy has a will to do something and it gets DONE. That’s powerful, and we don’t feel powerful most of the time.

Maybe you feel incapable of doing something. Maybe you feel like everyone is holding you back by telling you that you can’t do this or that.

The bad guys and the monsters aren’t listening to see if someone tells them that it’s ok.
They’re just doing doing what they want.

You may find yourself strangely attracted to an evil character or a vicious monster.
It’s not that you want to be evil or destructive, necessarily.

You want to be free.
You want to be able to will something and see it happen NOW.

This doesn’t mean that you don’t care about others, or that anything you can imagine is ok to do.

It does mean that your desire to do something that will benefit you and not harm anyone doesn’t have to pass through the bureaucracy of other people’s opinions about what’s possible for you.

You genuinely want it.
You’re not hurting anyone.

Learn from the monsters.
Learn from the bad guys.
Just do it.

If I were to ask one of my children, “Who are you?”, they would look at [...]]]> Ask someone, “who are you?”
There are a number of typical responses:

• Name
• Profession
• A list of skills or hobbies
• Personal or professional history
• A description that involves physical characteristics such as height, weight, and age
• Likes and dislikes

If I were to ask one of my children, “Who are you?”, they would look at me like I was nuts. As their father, I’m supposed to know the usual answers to that question.
I still want to ask them the question, but I’m looking for different answers.

The common answers to that question don’t touch the essence of who a person is, and that’s what I’m looking for. I don’t ask, though. Like most of us, they wouldn’t be able to answer.

The answer I’m looking for is tied to questions like:

• What are your goals and passions?
• What unique contributions, what gifts can you give to the world?

The answers to these questions are far more difficult to find, and I think that most of us haven’t found the complete answers to those questions. That’s if we’re even looking.But we can only go on hiding from ourselves for so long.

Day after day, you pretend to know yourself, and you pretend to know everything worth knowing about who you are.

And then you have a moment when you’re looking in the mirror at that familiar face, and you ask “Who is that? That face is lying. It’s pretending to be all of me. Someone in the world takes a look at that face and thinks that they know me?” “That face is just the surface of who I am. It doesn’t begin to touch upon my hopes and dreams and doubts. It doesn’t seem to capture the vast, unexplored places in myself with all their hopes and all their darkness.”

I think that one of the reasons that I like to pretend to know who I am, is that I want to hide from the large, mysterious parts of myself, full of wonderful and frightening discoveries. Like an iceberg, those mysterious parts of me are far larger than the “me” that I can see and claim to know. It’s not comforting to admit that the most wonderful and most dangerous parts of yourself are lurking, just out of sight. And that maybe, you’ll see them one day, and maybe you won’t. So we often settle for the “me” that I know already, with the good and the bad that’s familiar.

Read Facing the Darkness, Part II: The Shadow

For many adults, the images of the hidden that dominate Halloween are the uncertain, frightening, and dark side of [...]]]> There are festivals of masks and the hidden in many cultures.  In American culture, Halloween is one of the most dominant festivals of the mask.  Children particularly love dressing up and pretending to be someone else.

For many adults, the images of the hidden that dominate Halloween are the uncertain, frightening, and dark side of the hidden.
 
Many people have moments where they feel the masks that cover the world, and sense something hidden beyond them.  How often do we let ourselves notice the hidden in ourselves, and ask the question: Who’s behind the mask?

There are some questions that are rarely, if ever asked.

“Who am I?” is one of those questions.

Sure, we flutter around the edge of the question sometimes, with questions like these:

• What are my natural strengths and weaknesses?
• How am I different than other people?
• How am I the same as other people?
• What would I like to study in college?
• What kind of career/job/business do I want to work in?
• What skills have I learned?

But “Who am I” is a much deeper and more dangerous question than any of those. It includes questions like these:

• How real is the world that we “live in”?
• How much is our sense of the real colored by our limiting beliefs?
• What are the most radical boundaries to who I can be?
• If you strip away my experience and beliefs about what is possible and impossible for me, who could I become?
• With a dramatically different environment and set of experiences, could I be almost anyone – someone I admire or someone I despise?
• Should I think of myself as awareness and intelligence, with a personality plugged in, like a program loaded into a computer?
• Is it too late, at any age, to change dramatically?

In The Matrix, the character Morpheus  says to Neo:
“What you know, you can’t explain. But you feel it. You felt it your entire life: that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there.”

It’s fairly common for children to feel at one time or another that the world surrounding them is mechanical, unreal, robotic, and somehow they are the only real ones in this pretend world.  As a child I was often haunted by this feeling/image.  As in The Matrix, the mask that covers reality seems to hide something frightening and ominous.

When adults still feel that way, is this some kind of neurosis?

Carl Jung speaks of a personality archetype associated with a mythological character called Puer Aeternus,  Latin for “eternal child”. In mythology this refers to a childlike character, forever young. Jung speaks of this adult personality as a person who is stuck in a childlike attitude toward the world. He wants freedom, can’t handle boundaries, restrictions, and responsibility, and feels that everything is unreal and a prison.  

But what if you’re apparently grown up like me, handle responsibility just fine, yet you still feel the burden of arbitrary rules everywhere?
What if you handle the world fine, yet you still feel that there’s a mask that covers the world, giving us only a shadow of a greater world?
What if you feel that a child’s freshness, creativity, and ability to change is what we all need to cultivate?

Join the club.  I love Jung’s writings, and while I seem dangerously close to the Puer, I don’t want to hide in my childhood.  I want to build a world where we leverage the power of childhood in the service of building a magical world.

When I was about 20, I become haunted by another feeling/image that came to me one night while walking in Marin County, CA.  The world seemed to become so thin, as though all we see is a two-dimensional image projected onto a screen of paper.

If we could only reach out and tear through that thin paper, we’d find a richer, real world waiting behind it.  This is a different kind of mask.  It’s a richer world that’s hidden from us by the mask, not a dark one.

Is there another me and another world waiting if I find the courage and the way to reach out?  

I had a friend in high school named Wayne.  Wayne was a philosophically minded guy and loved questions like, “How do we know that we aren’t in a laboratory with our whole experience being simulated in some way?  I wonder sometimes if Wayne still has his “childlike” ability to put reality into question?

Many spiritual traditions teach that this world is only a stepping stone to another spiritual world, and this world is unreal in comparison.

But even within that approach, there’s a way to look at this world that gives our life a whole different tone from the “world as illusion” mindset.

We’re not in the malevolent prison of The Matrix.
The world is a rich simulation, here for us to learn from.  And this is not a “sit back and watch the movie” kind of learning.

It’s a “learn by doing” kind of learning simulation. We learn  – by building, by testing the rules and testing ourselves, by changing ourselves and the world, not by sitting around.

I’m often described as calm and cool. I find it easier to relax than most people, and easy to go to sleep. I enjoy using my hands to relax others.  I love making [...]]]> I love the stillness of the night, the quiet that surrounds you when everyone else in the house has gone to sleep.

I’m often described as calm and cool. I find it easier to relax than most people, and easy to go to sleep. I enjoy using my hands to relax others.  I love making peace between people, and I’m not a big fan of conflict. (And yes, I argue with my wife sometimes.)

We hear a lot about balance, peace, and relaxation.  “Don’t let your life get out of balance.”  “Don’t follow a goal obsessively.” “Don’t get too excited.  Stress isn’t good for you.”  “Don’t be tense.”

Sometimes I think being calm at the wrong times is my biggest problem! Some of us use peace and calm to hide from commitment, from taking a stand, from taking a chance, from being passionate about life, and embracing life in all of its uncertainty and wonder.

I’d like to trade some of that peace for passion.  

Are passion and peace enemies? Where does passion fit into a calm life?
Can I be a person with strong feelings and still have calm in my life?

Being calm isn’t an end in itself.  It’s a way to let go and let the world in.  It’s a way to temporarily release all the ways that I’m controlling and shaping the world, and just be in the world.

And what follows?  I go out and connect with that world that I just became aware of.  Learning is always a combination of listening and action.

Have you ever been afraid, like me, to let your passion show?  Have you ever been afraid to go after something wonderful with all your strength and all your heart?

We’re so good at hiding from our passions.
I feel wonderfully alive when I’m quiet in the presence of the ocean, a forest, a waterfall, or a mountain. I’m filled with a sense of connection, and the boundaries of my little inner world are shattered.

And I feel wonderfully alive when I let a passion for life burst out of my inner world into the outer world, when I feel my energy flow out of me at full strength, and make connections, in ways that I can see, and ways that I can’t see.

Dr. John Eliot wrote a contrarian book, Overachievement, that attacks a number of myths about peak performance (athletic or otherwise), and recommends the power of stress, play, passion, confidence, and commitment.

In the last few years I’ve become increasingly focused on the power of opposites, the power that comes from embracing both sides of forces that seem to oppose one another.

Do I have to choose between peace and passion?  I won’t settle for anything less than both.