The Shadow

Cohen: One thing we haven’t touched upon yet is “the shadow.” I found this one of the most powerful sections of the book.

Wilber: Thank you. Many people seem to have been deeply impacted by that chapter. The idea of the shadow is basically that there are dynamically repressed, disowned aspects of our own self. And this understanding is largely a contribution of the modern and postmodern West. If you look around the world and list five or six really great ideas that have been contributed by various cultures, this would be on the very short list—it’s one of the great, great discoveries about human nature, certainly alongside the discovery of the enlightened states and so on. And of course we associate it with names like Sigmund Freud, but it really has a long history that goes back several hundred years in the West, and some true giants worked on it. They saw that human beings have psychological anguish and suffering and neuroses and obsessions and fears, and they asked: “So where do these things come from?” Hopefully I’ve added a few insights of my own to this field, but I’m resting on the insights of these great researchers.

Basically, the shadow is what we call the disowned self. And the shadow, like so many aspects of the psyche, has a developmental story. We can just use the chakra system to give a simple example. When the young infant self starts out, it’s identified basically with material realities—the oral stage of development. Its entire self, its sense of I, is identified with the first chakra. Starting around the second year, its identity starts to move toward the second chakra. Its I-ness disidentifies with the first chakra, disidentifies with merely the material realm, and it starts to identify with the emotional/sexual impulses. And so now its sense of I is at the second chakra, which could be equated with magenta impulses (or purple meme impulses). So if you’re at, let’s say, the second chakra and you have certain impulses, for example, sexual impulses or anger, that become threatening—because your parents don’t like it or society doesn’t like it or you yourself just find it overwhelming—what you’ll do is take that angry impulse and push it to the other side of the self-boundary. So now it appears to be not self; it appears to not belong to you. The anger is still arising, but now it’s not your anger, so it must be someone else’s. So you project that anger, and you see it in others and in the environment: “Somebody’s angry; I know it’s not me, so it’s got to be you.” So what happens is that now instead of feeling angry, you feel that everybody is angry at you, and you might start to feel depressed because of that, to feel like the entire world is looking down on you. Now instead of being mad, you’re sad. And so what you have now is a psychological neurosis—you have a symptom, which is a sign of some repressed aspect of yourself that is now in your unconscious. And so the cure is to somehow befriend that anger, lower the repression barrier, and take it back and make it part of your I, because only when it consciously becomes part of your I can you truly let go of it. And then you can move to the third chakra.

Now actually, of course, you’ll move to the third chakra anyway, but the point is that if the self splits off a part of itself and represses it, that part doesn’t develop anymore. It stays at the level at which you split it off because it’s now not part of your I. Consciousness is continuing its developmental march, but if you push something out, then it’s no longer part of the conscious self and it’s not going to develop with you. So you end up with a whole series of subpersonalities or shadow impulses. And all of your little subpersonalities won’t develop—they will stay at the level of development at which you repressed them. So you can have a red subpersonality, an amber subpersonality, an orange subpersonality—wherever in the developmental scale you take part of your I and push it to the other side of the self-boundary, you’ll turn it from first-person I into second-person you or third-person it.

Now if we could just get rid of these impulses like that and they stayed out there, there would be no problem. But the trouble is that they are actually parts of our own self, and every time we push something to the other side of the self-boundary, we diminish our own consciousness; we make ourselves smaller. And that keeps us out of the present moment. Even if we are practicing the “power of Now,” if we’ve got a first-chakra subpersonality that wants to eat now and if we have a second-chakra subpersonality that wants to fuck now, we can’t really stay in the Now! So in addition to working on states and stages, if our consciousness isn’t freed up, we really have to work on our shadow.

Cohen: In order to free up our consciousness, we have to own these repressed parts of ourselves—we have to embrace all of them, we have to bring light into all the dark and hidden corners of our self, we have to claim ownership of the entirety of our I—before we can authentically transcend our ego in the spiritual sense.

Wilber: Exactly. When we repress these impulses, we’re not really transcending them and we’re not even really disidentifying with them; we’re dissociating from them. And this can become a very big problem. So understanding this distinction enables us to tell the difference between two very conflicting instructions we’re generally given by people who are trying to help us—therapists and meditation teachers—about how we should relate to different components of our own experience, for example, anger. Gestalt therapy will tell you to identify with it; Zen will tell you to disidentify with it. So what should you do? If you’re meditating and anger comes up, should you identify with it or disidentify with it? The answer is both, but in the correct sequence.

Cohen: Yes, because meditation and therapy are two very different contexts with very different purposes. When I was a seeker, way back in my twenties, I remember discovering just this dichotomy. I was a dedicated meditator who intuited the difference between the liberating experience of higher states of consciousness and the fact that there were emotional and psychological dimensions of my self that needed a kind of attention that meditation alone was incapable of giving. Unfortunately, a lot of people who were meditating with me didn’t seem to be so aware of this distinction. I remember doing some intensive vipassana retreats and sitting up in the middle of the night having an incredible time meditating, and out of the blue I would hear people letting out bloodcurdling screams or sobbing uncontrollably. And I always felt that this was not the appropriate context for this kind of psychodynamic catharsis. I was very aware that these kinds of developmental issues and neuroses, et cetera, needed to be dealt with in different therapeutic contexts, but I knew that the meditative context was fundamentally about letting go of everything.

Wilber: Yes, the meditative context is all about letting go, but we can only do that if we deal with our dissociated impulses first. What we want to do is take the very best from both worlds without diluting either. But if I have dissociated anger and come into a vipassana retreat, and if anger arises and all I’m supposed to do is say, “There is anger arising, there is anger arising . . . ,” I’m doing nothing to undercut the repression. I’m doing nothing to reown it. I’m just seeing that there’s anger in the world arising at me, and so I feel fear, “There is fear arising, there is fear arising. . . .” But fear is a false emotion because it is a reaction to my own projected anger.

Cohen: Right.

Wilber: I’m not supposed to get more in touch with fear—that’s not authentic. That’s inauthentic. So by just doing vipassana on a dissociated emotion, you are making it worse.

Cohen: You are making it a lot worse!

Wilber: There’s a big difference between transcendental disidentification and pathological dissociation. And once again, if there’s something that you haven’t owned—it can be power, sex, arrogance, emotivity, any of that—and then you try to let go of it, you make it worse.

Let’s take an example of somebody who has dissociated their fear and they start doing vipassana on it or doing Vedanta, “Who am I? Who am I?” letting go of the fear, letting go, letting go, “I’m not that, I’m not that,” even though that is an inauthentic emotion. And then he or she says, “I feel better when I do that, so I know it’s working.”

Cohen: Of course they feel better—temporarily!

Wilber: Yes. The analogy is, let’s say you get run over by a bus and you are sitting in the street looking at your broken leg. You can say, “I’m not that, I’m not that, I’m not that,” and you will feel better. You can actually get in a higher state of consciousness with a broken leg and you will feel better, and that’s fine.
But I’m saying that you need to fix the broken leg first and then also do “I’m not that, I’m not that,” and you’ve got the best of both worlds. The shadow is the broken leg, so we’ll tell you how to fix that. We’re not saying you can’t do the other, but fix the broken leg first and then also do vipassana or Vedanta. The leg is your vehicle of bodhisattvahood; it’s your vehicle of transmitting truth. If you are enlightened and you are sitting there with a broken leg and can’t walk anywhere, what good is it? You can’t teach if you’ve got a broken leg! But a lot of people do. They have awakened to these higher states of consciousness, but they have broken legs. So what we want to do is basically heal the vehicles through which we will manifest our enlightened awareness.

Cohen: Yes, I wholeheartedly agree. And to be honest, I’ve found that in the end, truly owning one’s shadow, or being willing to face oneself unconditionally, radically and ongoingly, seems to be not only more challenging but ultimately more significant in the transformative process than assuming a meditative posture. I work with this shadow dimension in the context of evolutionary enlightenment, which is in some ways different from working with the shadow in a therapeutic context. In this context, the shadow is seen as one manifestation of ego, and the reason that it is so essential to heroically endeavor to take responsibility for all of it is so that our actions will be able to manifest a clear expression of a truly enlightened intention in this world. I’m talking about a repeated demonstration of spontaneous integration and wholeness of intention and action, week to week, month to month, year to year, in such a way that we can unequivocally say: “This individual is awake.” The whole point is that unless the individual is willing to own their own shadow, they are going to continue acting out of all those repressed impulses and continue creating karma, which means acting out of ignorance and unconsciousness in ways that cause suffering to others. And the whole definition of enlightenment is that, at least ideally, we are supposed to become so conscious, so awake, that we don’t create karma anymore. Until an individual can at least own a significant portion of their own shadow, they can’t possibly take responsibility for themselves and become a truly autonomous, enlightened, integrated self who can really take on the evolutionary process.

Wilber: That’s for sure!

Cohen: Honestly, when you look at the kind of spiritual energy and passion that an individual would need to own all these different parts of the self, to truly endeavor to take responsibility for them and then to transcend them—this is a rare soul. In terms of the real love for God necessary to truly become whole, it has to be said that it’s a rare individual who cares that much, who would be willing to do that. In the end I really believe that in fact it is only those who awaken to a larger purpose, a purpose bigger than their own wholeness, salvation, or even enlightenment, who will actually find the energy and the resources to begin to own these darker and more unconscious parts of themselves and really change in ways that make all the difference in the world.

Wilber: Rare indeed. Thank you, my friend.