The Shadow: Hidden Gems of the Unconscious Mind
THE TREASURE BOX
Spiritual awakening is about uncovering the hidden elements of yourself that lay dormant within you. These qualities stay hidden in a treasure chest deep below the surface completely away from your conscious mind. This treasure box has one pad lock after another, as well as shields of armor standing guard for the utmost protection. It is imperative that your conscious mind never opens this secretive chest within you because when it does, the truth of what is really going on here will start to be revealed. You will begin to see things very differently and lose your attachment to the ego mind. As you can imagine, the ego does not want this to happen. It will work overtime to prevent you from discovering the keys to unlock this secret box hiding within you.
However, once your eyes have been opened enough, there is no turning back. When you start to see things from an entirely new perspective, you cannot unsee it. You can certainly try to, you can push it away, kick and scream running in the opposite direction, but eventually it will pull you into a place that you truly need to be. Your mind will resist and work to convince you that this is not what you want or need in your life, but the spirit within sees otherwise. Once you embrace this new perspective and become willing and curious enough to see what it has to offer you, everything shifts. You now become interested in listening to the larger awareness, the spirit within you. Your eyes have opened to the deeper essence in life, and you are actively looking at your ego mind’s thought system and the concepts that dominated your definition of self.
THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND
As you dive deep into the underworld of your mind, you will realize there are a large basket of hidden aspects, concepts, narratives, and stories that reside in the dark, or in the shadow of yourself. These aspects are often projected outward into our behaviors and beliefs without even knowing or understanding why. The conflicted dual mind has the ability to hide information from our conscious awareness in that treasure trove discussed above. This dark hidden shadow is a part of everyone. All minds have this same ability to repress memories and experiences, so we do not have to feel them any longer. Whether the experience was difficult, violent, traumatic, or if it was positive, uplifting, and exciting any emotion, feeling, or memory can be tucked away in a nice cozy corner of your mind where you become completely unaware of its existence. However, just because you are not aware of it, does not mean it isn’t sitting there eating at you and projecting outward into your daily life.
The famous psychoanalyst, Carl Jung, brought the idea of the shadow to the world of psychology and psychotherapy. His interpretation of the unconscious mind was broken down into two categories. The personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious consists of your experiences, hidden emotions, fears, and past traumas, as well as positive elements of a person’s life. The often undesirable repressed memories that you were once conscious can move into the unconscious mind. They can greatly impact your behavior and attitude. Even though these feelings are hiding from you in the shadow of your unconscious, the ideas have powerful influence over your life, without you even knowing it. You may feel strongly about a particular belief that is rooted deep within you, yet you may not be consciously aware of why it is there. Often people project the very things they despise which are hidden deep down inside of themselves. Have you ever loathed a quality in another person and realized you have that same exact quality in yourself? It can be a very eye-opening realization, which may open you to further discover these hidden gems within yourself.
The collective unconscious holds the shared beliefs of different cultures, ancestral patterns, and most famously Jung’s explanation of collectively shared archetypes that human beings inherently play out throughout their lives. There are universal themes and symbols that all cultures innately share. As stated on SimplyPsychology.org, some of Jung’s more popular archetypes were The Mother, The Child, The Wise old man, The Hero, and The Trickster. These are common characteristics many people throughout the world share at some point during his or her lifetime. Some people may embody just one or multiple archetypes during the many different stages of life.
However, Jung used four in particular to form the main traits of the personality. The Persona, The Animus/Anima, The Shadow, and The Self were what he primarily focused on in determining the human psyche. The Persona is the mask we wear in the world, or the actor we play in front of others. The Animus/Anima represents the masculine and feminine qualities each person contains. The Shadow holds the unconscious repressed emotions and experiences we project out as behavior, beliefs, and attitudes, and The Self is the purity of who we really are. Carl Jung used these concepts to help bring the hidden treasure box to the surface to see through the many masks people wear and into a state of wholeness and harmony with who you are meant to be in this world.
Carl Gustav Jung's Theory of Personality in Psychology (simplypsychology.org)
DREAMS - INSIGHTS INTO THE UNCONSCIOUS
Have you had a recurring dream or a particular theme that continues to present itself to you at night? Do you wake up wondering what it is about and why you are having it over and over again? Are there symbols involved that just won’t quit? Dreams are one way that our unconscious mind communicates with us. If we are too distracted with life’s many challenges during our waking state, the mind will do it’s best to bring the hidden treasures to our attention. You can either look at them to see what they might be saying, or you can toss them aside as just a dream. There are many ways to interpret and analyze dreams, and many experts will claim they mean specific things. However, it is important to remember that your dreams are specific to you, and no one else can truly grasp a hold of them. Therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and the people closest to you can certainly offer insight, however, you are the one that ultimately deciphers the code. After all, you are the dreamer of the dream.
There are symbolic dreams of communication, as well as psychic dreams. Many people report getting warnings of something to come in their life, or someone else’s life through their dream state. Others are bothered by what they are dreaming and seek a deeper interpretation. During a very transformative time in my life, when I had no idea what was happening to me, I had a series of dreams that lasted several years. They began extremely dark and terribly frightening. Demonic faces, possessions over my body, purging of strange unwanted materials in the body, and feeling like something was controlling me were constantly showing up in the blockbuster horror film in my head at night. Over time, these dreams transformed into healing dreams, dreams of being taught by an old silver haired man on how to work with energy to heal myself and others. I went from being thrown around in the air and pulled up walls hitting ceilings to lifting up out of the body at will. I began travelling through portals into other worlds, seeing energy in and around people, and what appeared to be a mode of time travel.
I would actively record these details and realized that something much deeper was happening to me. My dreams were clearly representing what I knew deep down to be true. Because I could not fully grasp the enormity of this transformation during my daily life, my dream state was acting as a guide for a much deeper understanding. During the day, fear could quite literally take a hold of me, and I was unable to cross the bridge into stillness, peace, and spiritual communication. So, for a time, my unconscious was showing up every night. Once I fully accepted this awakening process, these dreams disappeared. I use this as an example to illustrate how helpful dreams can be in allowing the Shadow to shine forth so you can embrace these aspects of self.
If we are capable of being communicated to in our dreams at night, isn’t it possible to receive this information in our waking state? Unfortunately, most of us are too entrenched in life to hear any intuitive communication, therefore dreams are the next best offering. Dreams are proof that the mind never stops creating, imagining, foreshadowing, questioning, analyzing, or deflecting. Think about it. At night, we feel tired, we can’t stay awake another second, yet the only thing that is tired is the body. The body needs rest. The mind keeps cruising from one adventure land to another all night long. Some people remember everything, others remember bits and pieces, yet others have no recollection of dreaming anything. It seems that if you need to remember a dream, you will, and if you don’t, maybe there is nothing to see just yet, or you are being gifted a truly peaceful night sleep. Who really knows? We can only look deeper and see what these unusual mental stories are trying to tell us.
WHY IS THE SHADOW PRESENT?
You can certainly spend a lot of time researching psychology, both Freud and Jung offer great insights into the unconscious. The mind is a fascinating thing, it’s quite literally masterful. But one question that comes to mind is why is the shadow and unconscious mind are present at all? Why is there a need to hide information from ourselves? It seems strange to hide important details. Is it too traumatic? Is it a defense mechanism automatically deployed without knowing why? Or, is there a much larger collective truth hiding from all of us? What could be so important, so precious, that the mind created a system of layers so we never see what is sitting at the bottom? Why is the mind creating such a masterful complication? What is it distracting us from?
A Course in Miracles gives the most descriptive understanding of the mind, the world, what is real, and what it isn’t. The entire spiritual text is designed to wake you up from what it describes as the dream of the world. This is not just your dream state at night, but a much deeper illusion of a world we have simply believed to be true. Using the unconscious mind, you could say that the hidden gems underneath all of your personal unconscious information, is where Jung was pointing to, in the collective unconscious. Taking it a step further, moving beyond Jung’s archetypes, shared symbols, and meanings passed down from one ancestral generation to the next, there is a shared belief we all have to be in this world.
According to A Course in Miracles, we all share fear and guilt of leaving God, plain and simple. Everything else is a cover-up, a distraction from this very real feeling we have hidden within ourselves, that we are afraid to return Home. Just look at all the levels of consciousness, both the lower and the higher realms. The lower realm of fear is covered up just like the higher levels of pure love and awareness are hidden. Everything in between seems to keep us mindless. Even if we begin to uncover repressed memories, traumas, and emotions and release them, this main theme will still linger until we recognize there is a spiritual guide within to lead us out of this unreal world of dreams.
This is a hard concept for many to grasp, as the world seems so real. Most people will begin reading the Course, only to get scared and put the book down. However, just take a look at what the world is. Think of how the mind distracts on a minute-to-minute basis. Look at what goes on here, chaos constantly. We are so rooted in this world, so attached to what we have here, that we are completely mindless to the spiritual nature within ourselves that is designed to show us the way Home. The mind, and the unconscious shadow has a huge purpose, to keep us from seeing the Truth and our Real Home in God. It is keeping the fear and guilt of leaving Source hidden, so we never look at it. Instead, the mind projects these traits out into the world, and this is the perspective of A Course in Miracles. If we see this, if we feel this sacred space within ourselves, it is over for the wrong minded aspect of ourselves. The ego serves no valuable purpose, and we begin to choose a different teacher, the spirit within. Is it possible that all of these layers of the mind are there to keep us believing in a world that is ultimately not real, and not who we are? Is A Course in Miracles here to correct this error in our mind so we can begin our journey back Home? That is ultimately for each and every one of us to decide. One thing is clear, there is a much deeper purpose to the Shadow and the unconscious mind.