The Dark Side of Ourselves

What happens to the shadow of our dark side is like a beach ball. If you hold the beach ball under water, what happens when you look away? You do not pay attention to the beach ball and it pops up and hits you in the face. This is what we see with all these public officials and what is going on with the economy and corporations. All these shadows are popping up, but they are not just hitting that person in the face. We are all standing by getting drenched and soaked in some of the worst times for people that we can imagine facing today.

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Hitler had a dark side, but what did he want to create? He wanted to create, in his mind, a beautiful society of blond haired and blue-eyed people and he was an ugly little man. This is a great expression of the shadows. He hated what he was, so what did he want to do? He wanted to wipe out anything that he considered imperfect and to create a race of what he wanted to be. People follow this because that is the way the world is made up. Somebody stands up and they have this confidence and create a collective shadow because people are so insecure. They do not trust themselves. They do not trust their intuition, so we have a world where we follow somebody who stands up with a loud voice and they have a confident persona and people follow that person. We can look at the world right now and see people similar to this and think, how can anyone listen to that person?

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When we are kids, we play with our shadows. When you are little, there is nothing more fun than seeing your shadow and playing with it, dancing with it and making shadow puppets. As you get older, that shadow is part of you that you do not want anybody to see. You want to get rid of it. These shadows that we hide, these parts of ourselves that we are ashamed of, that we are embarrassed by, we will do anything to shut down our creativity and get into addictions. What is an addiction? Addictions are a source of this level. It is just hating parts of who you are because you do not feel good with your own mind and body. When you are trying to suppress all these aspects and all of these uncomfortable feelings, we have a system that tells us we should do whatever it takes to feel better and that is ridiculous.  All you have to do is watch a baby and you know what it is to be human. One minute the baby is laughing, the next minute they are soundly sleeping, the next minute they are crying or screaming. We all have emotions and we are not teaching our children how to express themselves when this might actually be of some good use. 

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Does having a dark side mean we are evil? No. It is simply part of being human. We all know whatever these qualities are meant to be. We would not know sunshine if we did not know darkness. We would not know light if we did not know dark. We would not have courage if we did not have fear. We need both qualities. We would not know love if we did not know hate. Humans see and understand these contrasts. The dark side is anything that we deem dark. When did we learn that? We learned that when someone teased us. You’re being a baby. You are stupid. Whatever they called you became a shadow part of your self that you hate. These are qualities that we have to struggle with in this lifetime. We do have a tendency toward different shadow qualities, but I think most of them are learned. How many people did not want to be like their father or mother? When you get older, you see those parts of them coming up in you. You either have to deal with the shadow or the shadow deals with you.