⛅︎ Out there and in here

Today is part six in our limited series about the role of the shadow in finding alternatives to our inherited cultural stories. If you missed the introduction, it’s here.

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“When you think everything is someone else’s fault, you will suffer a lot. When you realize that everything springs only from yourself, you will learn both peace and joy.” ~ Dalai Lama

I’ve heard the term “spiritual growth” so much that at some point I stopped wondering what it means. Wise teachers tell us that spiritual growth stalls when we attack others as evil instead of facing our own failures. With honest self-appraisal ideally comes the humility to recognize our need to grow and expand our capacity to learn from those with whom we disagree. In a sense, spiritual growth is a process of making room for the opposites inside of us.

This requires a stretching of consciousness, a way of confronting our self-imposed boundaries, our cultural story of separateness, and the oversimplification of everything precious. The story is so deeply ingrained that it taxes the imagination to see good and evil as part of one whole, rather than an opposition that begs to be resolved through force and war.

“As we work together to restore hope to the future, we need to include a new and strange ally - our willingness to be disturbed. Our willingness to have our beliefs and ideas challenged by what others think.” ~ Margaret Wheatley, Turning to One Another

The promise is that we will find peace only when we stop projecting our shadow onto others to blame them for our discomfort. Spiritual growth can occur when I recognize that my habit of thinking in opposites expresses as prejudice: this, not that. Right, not wrong. Good, not evil.

If prejudice divides, reconciliation makes us whole. Its root, conciliate, derives from Latin, meaning “to bring together,” from concilium, “meeting” or “council.” I think of a council circle, an ancient practice found in most human cultures, where important matters are discussed and resolved. Council is a ceremony, a specific protocol of sitting in a circle, speaking and listening from the heart. Being well heard is a powerful way to feel part of a whole. Indeed, a council circle is a way of enacting and embodying individuality within wholeness.

Wholeness will never be realized when pursued through forceful means as a triumph over evil. This is easier to say than to practice. Especially in a culture that tends to view spiritual pursuits as the public performance of superior virtue, or as a private matter, or as the inferior hocus-pocus of innocents and primitives, or an excuse to conquer. We are told that evil is evil and must be confronted, rooted out, hunted down in the night by shadow forces like Seal Team 6. We have elected proxies to keep up our wars against the opposites that we cannot tolerate, along with the story that we can triumph over them.

What would our world look like if instead we saw that this warring mode itself is the evil? That, instead of triumph over evil, wholeness seeks balance and integration and kindness. Not “this versus that,” but “this and that.”

It can be unsettling and destabilizing to think this way. How can a system that includes evil be considered safe? In reality, no safety is possible under the story that we can rid ourselves, and the world, of evil. That’s as absurd and unnatural as saying that we no longer want the element Mercury in the world and we’re going to root it out and eliminate it wherever we find it. The only thing we can do is to seek balance, starting inside ourselves.

Maybe it’s more than a frustrating habit that I tend to perceive opposites and see people as “others.” What if it’s a special faculty that we all have? A gift that facilitates healing the separations within and between us. So that, when confronted with the discomfort and disorientation of having my story challenged, I can remember that hidden inside is the invitation to grow, to make space in my worldview for another perspective.

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