Photo by Ashley Batz on Unsplash
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious. Carl Jung (goodreads.com)
We are living in increasingly absurd times in our refusal to know ourselves as embodied souls. From a mystical vertical dimension, denial is an energy of contraction away from life and the timeless beauty of our being. For many, our conscious identity is formed around a contracted wounded version of ourselves. It is this identity that must diminish substantially for us to hear our soul and its constant expansion informing of our body, heart, and mind.
When we gather together to see, feel, and name the identity within us, we bring the soul’s light onto our wounded humanity. We have been conditioned to deny life’s suffering as a way of life. We now do this in increasingly sophisticated disguised ways. Our life energy is used to create an illusionary life built upon our collective denial of suffering, where suffering becomes a “no-go zone” in our collective psyche, as Jung addresses. Soul contact does not separate itself from suffering.
When fear is not acknowledged, it is projected onto the world around us. Unintegrated fear gathers clutter in our collective living room. Please make no mistake: fear is a fierce competitor for our attention. Fear works like a yeast that grows until it is tended. It is, therefore, a relentless survival energy that we are wise to befriend and understand. If not, every decision I make will be flavoured with it. I will be living a life formed out of fear rather than love. Einstein referred to the most important decision we make in life as whether or not the world is friendly.
Projected unowned fear creates a decidedly unfriendly world. It accumulates as a massive fear shadow within our collective and ancestral energy. Its presence denies access to the inner dimensions of our hearts and soul. Without contact with our inner soul home, we attempt to create an external home that will protect us from feeling our inner fears. We are finding out that this backwards approach to life does not work — individually and collectively. As Betty Kovaçs says in her 2024 Anthony Chene interview, when we feel ourselves as separate from life, we feel the need to control life (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALFrYW5mgZw).
I love working with small groups with a responsible relationship to exploring shadows. When we slow down together to witness and embody the massive unintegrated fear shadows within us, new inner worlds emerge. Before we know it, we are creating new outer worlds through our increased trust in life as it is. We can feel hopeful and uplifted for no apparent external reason. We seem to understand that life has more dimensions to her than we realized. We discover that we can trust life even when the going gets tough and will even get tougher.
The accumulated trash bin of discarded shadows is now everybody’s business because our collective living room is becoming intolerable. Denial of this responsibility also denies the life within us. Projecting our denied fear onto certain populations or persons or leaving it for the next generation denies access to the oneness intelligence of our soul. Whether we like it or not, our soul is here for all of life — wounded and beautiful. Meeting fear with curiosity paradoxically awakens the timeless unconditioned soul-love waiting to be discovered within our body, heart, and mind.
When my death-time arrives, it will be a life transition. I hope to slip away easily knowing that I have served life through my God-given determination to be present for the transcend and include nature of soul-love: that timeless unconditional life-belonging that meets unintegrated fear with tender understanding. When the soul is no longer denied by our unintegrated fear projections, death simply dissolves into life. And life is restored to love.