Especially since the COVID-19 pandemic started, with all the attendant chaos that it has induced, but to a lesser extent even before that, I had retreated from the world and especially from politics and social criticism because much of what was going on just seemed crazy and was unintelligible to me. Much of it seemed intrinsically unintelligible because it just didn’t participate in any rational pattern that I could discern. Under these circumstances, I think I made an implicit and explicit decision not to engage with politics and current events very much.

I’m beginning to perceive something that changes the game for me on many levels and with many implications. I can’t express it all because it’s too big. The essence of it, as far as I can tell, is the integration of the Dark side and of Shadow. The insights are being triggered by exposure to the Rebel Wisdom channel on YouTube. I’ve been listening to Rebel Wisdom videos around the Intellectual Dark Web, Jordan Peterson. Ken Wilber, and Doshin Roshi. I will include some links at the bottom of the article. I can’t remember encountering any movement that was really seeing through the fog of mainstream society, politics, and media the way this group is and speaking about it publicly in a fairly high-profile, cogent, and clear manner.

What I’m seeing is that the seeming unintelligibility of current events and politics was due to too much identification with the Light or positive side of things. I wanted to understand myself and the world purely rationally, and much of what is going on is not rational. It does not participate in that principle of order. Therefore, it just made little sense.

I knew intuitively that conspiracy theories were too simplistic. I believe that conspiracy theories are an attempt to manufacture certainty in a situation that seems chaotic and unintelligible. I find when I examine them that they are unlikely and make no sense in terms of the effects they supposedly have coupled with the interests of those who are supposedly creating them. So, for instance, it makes no sense to me that the Chinese government created and released the SARS-COV-2 virus for the simple reason that, if true, they wrecked the world economy and therefore their own economy in doing so. If you say they did it for some longer-range goal such as world-domination, I say there are too many variables beyond their control for such a plan to work reliably and it’s too risky. The same criticisms apply to most conspiracy theories I’ve looked at. To me, it’s just an attempt to create certainty in a situation where things don’t make much sense.

I believe and am experiencing that in order to begin to make some sense of what is going on in the world today, it’s necessary to integrate within ourselves the dark, chaotic, non-rational aspects of ourselves. The reason is because most or all of what’s going on today that makes no sense to a rational perspective is being driven by these same dark forces. We can’t understand them if we have no access to them within ourselves. We can’t look at the dark aspects of the world squarely if we are avoiding and repressing them within ourselves.

The psychologist C.G. Jung taught that we each have a Shadow side that comprises all the qualities and energies in ourselves that we reject and disown. The more we are identified with the Light, positive, rational, nice, and agreeable parts of ourselves, the more we repress and deny their opposites, the Dark, negative, irrational, difficult, and disagreeable parts. In the psychological economy, just as in physics, these Dark energies don’t go away because we deny them access to awareness. Instead they tend to become darker and ultimately autonomous and demonic. The Dark energies come out in ways that are beyond our conscious knowledge and control.

The Dark energies are most dangerous when they are unacknowledged. They form autonomous complexes (aka demons in traditional terminology). This is the source, for instance, of mass-shootings and other similar phenomena. It’s these denied parts of the psyche, which without access to awareness, build and grow into autonomous dark spirits that are under the control of no one.

The situation is different, however, when we consciously allow these Dark energies access to awareness. Jung called this Shadow work. We tend to be afraid to let them into awareness because there is a fear that they would be very destructive. Actually indiscriminate destructiveness is a quality of these energies that depends on them remaining buried in the basement of the psyche apart from conscious awareness. When we allow them to come into the Light of awareness, they transform and transmute. No longer are they subject to go out of control. Awareness is the universal solvent that transforms them. They don’t become Light. They become wise and necessary balances to an overly Light-oriented psyche.

So, for example, when I have integrated the Shadow to a certain extent, I can begin to understand in myself, the darker aspects of governments, society and other people. I realize that I too have the potential to do those things. I understand what motivates them and how they operate. So, for instance, I become much more able to spot someone who is manipulating and trying to take advantage of me. Before, when I was one-sidedly Light-oriented, I could be taken advantage of because I couldn’t see it when others were operating from the Dark side. Now that I know I could do those things, I’m able to recognize them when others do them.

I also become much more able to understand the machinations of power and power-politics. The motivations and operational modes of those in power suddenly become understandable because I am no longer repressing those tendencies in myself. I’m not becoming just like those people. I don’t have to act out my dark tendencies. They are no longer arising beyond my awareness and control. They are still there and can be used in the service of myself and others. The Dark energies become tools at my disposal to use or not use appropriately.

I become a balanced rather than one-sided human being. For too too long we have been taught a one-sided morality that doesn’t jibe with the facts of the psyche. It’s just not possible to be all Light and to eliminate Darkness entirely as many of us have been taught and have believed. I’m not advocating an ultimate dualism of Light and Dark and neither was Jung. I’m just speaking to the fact that at the level of phenomena, these polarities exist and have to be acknowledged and dealt with wisely.

Mysticism, Spirit, and Shadow – Jordan Peterson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAsR6DZTvS8

Inside the Intellectual Dark Web

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOBa9sRn2zE

What the F*ck is Going On

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkKnOEQlwl4&t=734s

Spirituality and Conspiracy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZHZHygS3Es

Doshin Asks Ken Wilber about Shadows

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_lxS_blPvM

A Zen Master Talks About Jordan Peterson and the Shadow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABWeA203Q-c

Glitch in the Matrix II: The Origin of the Intellectual Dark Web

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKeMIWVOnbo&t=1763s

Steven White

August 16, 2020