Enlightenment. Enlightenment is a word that puts its finger on a dearly-desired spiritual state of being. To move from ignorance to enlightenment. 

I thought I knew what it meant, but then a paradoxical saying from the great psychologist Carl Jung came knocking on my door. The saying was, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the [Shadow] conscious.” 

What do you think about that? Are you familiar with the psychological concept of the Shadow, and the work of making it conscious? 

Jungian analyst Robert Johnson says that “to honor and accept one’s own Shadow is a profound spiritual discipline. It is … the most important experience of a lifetime.” 

I mean, as Unitarian Universalists on a spiritual journey, we must take a closer look! 

Carl Jung with all his provocative ideas came into my life in college. But long before that, in middle school, I’d read something that actually was my first literary lesson about the Shadow. It was 7th or 8th grade, and I spotted on the library shelf a book entitled The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson. It gripped me. I came away from it with a complicated insight about how people work: that when a person’s conscious part is one way, it will be balanced by a part in the unconscious that is the opposite way. If the conscious part is all light, the unconscious part will be equal and opposite to that: all Shadow. 

And so, in Stevenson’s book, you have Dr. Jekyll, who portrays the conscious part of the man. This part is a perfect gentleman. He is all good, to an extreme. He therefore functions well in society. But then comes the horrific discovery. His conscious part is not all there is to him. There is another part, buzzing with energy, possessing its own personality and point of view. This part, existing outside of consciousness, calls itself Mr. Hyde, and Mr. Hyde is the opposite of a perfect gentleman. Usually this Shadow part “hides.” But under certain circumstances, Mr. Hyde takes over and lets off steam in the form of socially unacceptable behaviors. When the steam has been let off sufficiently, he goes back to “hiding” again, and Dr. Jekyll reasserts control.

It’s as if Robert Louis Stevenson, that Christian Scottish writer of the 19th century, was applying ancient Asian wisdom coming from thousands of miles away to his understanding of what it means to be a human being. This wisdom is that of the Principle of Yin and Yang, which teaches that everything in existence is made of chi (energy) in some combination of opposite but interconnected, mutually perpetuating forces. 

Day and night, strong and weak, good and evil: the Principle of Yin and Yang says that you can’t have one without each other, and at their extremes they even turn into each other, so that when night gets darkest, day is right around the corner; too much strength, and the seeds of weakness are planted; and (directly to the point about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), the harder we try to be pure and good, the harder we fall.

Of course, we need not travel all the way to China for this insight. Wisdom from ancient Greece, carried into Medieval times and then into the Renaissance, spoke of the all-important virtue of Temperance. The Tarot originated during the Renaissance and here is its portrayal of this virtue: 

Temperance says that people with strength and integrity of character are that way because they live at the balance between extremes. Within themselves, they sense both light and Shadow forces; outside themselves, same thing. But rather than clinging to one opposite and banishing the other, they stay connected to each. The angel in the Tarot card represents this as an action of mixing liquid from two different jars. Mix and keep on mixing them; above all, prevent them from staying separate because separation causes each of them to take increasingly extreme and unstable forms. The lesson is crucial. No less than the Archangel Michael, the strongest Archangel of them all, is on this Tarot card, demonstrating this truth.

Now, a moment ago when speaking about The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I mentioned that the Mr. Hyde part is usually “hidden”–but that, under certain circumstances, he appears, takes over control, and lets off steam in the form of socially crude and unacceptable behaviors. When the steam has been let off sufficiently and psychic balance has been re-established, he goes back to “hiding” again, and Dr. Good Guy reasserts control. How this happens in the book is interesting but is not at all true to real life. In real life, here’s what the showing forth of the Shadowy Mr. Hyde can look like. 

Sometimes it looks like a person becoming different at the flick of a switch. Do you know, for example, anyone who is usually gentle as a lamb but when they get behind the steering wheel, watch out? The lamb is suddenly all lion? The lamb-become-lion is aggressive. They speed, they tailgate others, they weave in and out of traffic, they run red lights, there can even be road rage. If the lamb-become-lion is not actually behind the wheel, they’ll be the obnoxiously picky side-seat or back-seat driver. But where oh where did the sweet lamb person you used to know go? It happens at the flick of a switch. The Mr. Hyde within, hiding, is all of a sudden there in all his ugliness. 

Does this ring any bells? 

It is a truism that, depending on the situation we’re in or the role we’re playing, different parts of us will come out. But some situations and roles are more likely than others to trigger the Shadowy Mr. Hyde part who brings trouble and shame to our other part, the conscious part, the Dr. Jekyll part we are most used to, the part that works hard to maintain social appropriateness and acceptability. 

Today happens to be St. Patrick’s Day, and a day like this can also be a trigger for the Shadowy inner Mr. Hyde to come out. Halloween or Mardi Gras also–all are publicly-affirmed times of partying and turning social norms upside down. So, along comes St. Patty’s Day and, if you live in Chicago, you’ll see that the river running through town has been entirely dyed green! 

That’s not normal! Savannah, Georgia dyes green its downtown city fountains. Not normal! Other towns and cities create their own versions of “not normal.” Most everywhere there’s a parade, bars offer drink specials and St. Patty’s Day events. Things feel electric with the promise of letting off steam. The inner Mr. Hyde naturally feels called out, and if a person’s psychic balance is not too off, one’s Mr. Hyde might actually just be super fun to hang out with. He’ll indulge in just one or two green beers and a little bit of festivity and mischief, and call it a day. But if a person’s usual Dr. Jekyll self has been too extremely good, well, Mr. Hyde will want to come out with guns blazing. St. Patty’s Day often sees plenty of drunk driving, property damage, disrespect towards authority, public urination and vomiting, and general mayhem. Many of the people doing this, when they recover, will say, “I don’t know what came over me!” “Who was that party animal??” 

It was your inner Mr. Hyde, on extreme mode. 

The harder we try to be pure and good, the harder we fall.

The Principle of Yin and Yang isn’t just woo-woo spirituality. Temperance is not a key spiritual ideal for nothing. 

The author of Owning Your Own Shadow, Robert Johnson (I highly recommend this book), shares a story about yet a different kind of situation that triggers a person’s Shadow to stop hiding and come out. Essentially, it’s any sort of situation preceded by a time when someone or something was particularly trying to your patience, but you gritted your teeth, you forced yourself to stay calm, and you outlasted the frustration successfully. Here’s Robert Johnson’ story of this: “I remember,” he says, “a weekend when I put up with very difficult guests who stayed days beyond their invitation. I exercised herculean patience and courtesy and sighed in great relief when they left. I thought I had earned something nice by my virtue so went to the nursery to buy something beautiful for my garden. Before I knew what was happening, I picked a fight with the nurseryman and made a miserable spectacle of myself.” Now listen to how Robert Johnson, the Jungian analyst, explains this: “Since I did not pick up my Shadow consciously, I landed it on this poor stranger. Balance was served, but in a clumsy and stupid way.” Isn’t that interesting? Has your patience ever been tested by some very frustrating situation, you passed that test, but you didn’t take a moment to “consciously pick up your Shadow”? (more about what that means in a moment). You didn’t do that, so, later on, “before you knew what was happening,” your Mr. Hyde came out and restored psychic balance–restored the balance between Yin and Yang–by acting nastily towards a cashier, a waiter or waitress, your kids, your partner, your dog? 

This story is also important because it underscores how any effort to completely eliminate one’s Shadow or keep it repressed indefinitely is bound to fail. No matter how hard or how long you grit your teeth and try to be only good, the effort will always fail. In fact, the more the Shadow is resisted, the more it persists. What’s the classic and tragic/ironic demonstration of this? The conservative Christian pastor who thunders again and again from the pulpit about sexual purity and the immorality of homosexuality–and then, one day in the news, you see how they were caught in a same-sex act of public lewdness. 

The Shadow–the disowned, disavowed, excluded traits and powers of our personality, the inner Mr. Hyde–is here to stay. 

The Mr. Hyde shadow can even come out in a way that transcends the personal. Carl Jung, that key source of wisdom about the Shadow, was particularly struck by this collective dimension. “To [the individual],” Carl Jung says, “it is incredible that [his Shadow side of little foibles and weaknesses] should ever in any circumstances go beyond himself. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each individual is only one tiny cell in the monster’s body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost.” Yes, the Shadow of separate individuals can form a mass and become a raging monster. It’s what happened to Germany, that pre-eminent nation of scientific rationality, philosophical lucidity, and bastion of civilization in the 19th century. But in the 20th century, it flip flopped. It was transformed into the Nazi juggernaut and committed some of the worst atrocities history has ever seen, including the Holocaust. 

Genuine monsters can arise, collective monsters composed of the individual Shadow cells of multiple people, all finding resonance with each other, all vibrating to a shared tune of malice. I’m sorry I keep mentioning Donald Trump; I know we are all tired of him; but he continues to be a prime illustration of so many psychological concepts. He is a master at inviting the Shadow to come out. Witness one of his rallies for yourself. Witness how they are, as the Washington Post says, “festivals of grievance and retribution,” “dystopian visions of darkness and despair,” “a bacchanalia of lies and mistruths.” Individual Shadow cells, resonating to the common tune of outrage and emergency, becoming a movement, a collective Shadow being, at Trump’s command…..

Whether individually or collectively, the Shadow finds a way to come out. The question now becomes, What does all of this imply about our common human condition? How might we “consciously pick up the Shadow” (as Robert Johnson says), rather than the Shadow coming out in ways that are destructive to others and to ourselves? 

As we turn to this vital question, it’s important to understand first and foremost the original reason why you and I and everyone grow up to have different parts, light parts and Shadow parts both. Poet Robert Bly, in his article entitled “The Long Bag We Drag Behind Us,” speaks of “a child running” as “a living globe of energy. We had,” he says, “a ball of energy, all right; but one day we noticed that our parents didn’t like certain parts of that ball. They said things like ‘Can’t you be still?’ […] Behind us we have an invisible bag, and the part of us our parents don’t like, we, to keep our parents’ love, put in the bag. By the time we go to school our bag is quite large. Then our teachers have their say: ‘Good children don’t get angry over such little things.’ So we take our anger and put it in the bag. By the time my brother and I were twelve in Madison, Minnesota, we were known as ‘the nice Bly boys.’ Our bags were already a mile long.”

Can you relate? Just how long is your bag? 

The socialization process happens most intensely in the first half of life, as we develop the basics of our personality, grow into our gender orientation, go through school, learn social graces, seek career success, cultivate important relationships, and engage in the busyness of adult life. As David Richo says in his book Shadow Dance, “To gain and maintain approval, we may have had to exhibit only the personality that was acceptable to our parents. Later in life we may have persisted in that self-negating routine with other adults, our partners, and our peers.” Now, note especially that language of “self-negating routine”! When we speak of socialization or enculturation, self-negation is an integral part of that. 

And you know what’s most tragic about self-negation? Listen to David Richo again: “By hiding the personality traits that were considered objectionable, we lost out on our chance to rework and move through them. Instead, they simply went underground. Qualities that required only some sanding and polishing were confined to the cellar, our unconscious, as useless or even dangerous. […] Given the chance, an ugly aggressiveness might have been trimmed to assertiveness, unwelcome controlling ways might have been spruced up into efficient leadership, fear might have even become love.” 

This passage is extremely important for us to hear because it affirms that the Mr. Hyde within, however ugly and scary his appearances might be when he shows himself, was originally not that. The Shadow is not fundamentally evil. Originally, what you had were simply childish behaviors. Being childishly selfish, being childishly loud, being childishly controlling, and more. If these parts hadn’t been cut off (via the old self-negating routine) they would have evolved into more civilized abilities. But they were cut off. You had to negate them to survive. And, as Robert Bly tells us, “when we put a part of ourselves in the bag it regresses. It de-evolves toward barbarism.” And then Bly asks, “Suppose a young man seals a bag at twenty and then waits fifteen or twenty years before he opens it again. What will he find? Sadly, the sexuality, the wildness, the impulsiveness, the anger, the freedom he put in have all regressed; they are not only primitive in mood, they are hostile to the person who opens the bag. The man who opens his bag at forty-five or the woman who opens her bag rightly feels fear. She glances up and sees the shadow of an ape passing along the alley wall; anyone seeing that would be frightened.” 

Confronting the Shadow can indeed be a daunting prospect, especially when you come to it in the second half of life, as most people do, because this time of life is, traditionally, when (a) people have more time to focus on psychological healing and spiritual growth, and (b) the build-up of pressures in a person to become more balanced can no longer be denied. The typical pattern is something like this. By middle age, you’ve spent half your life pressuring yourself to live up to social expectations and pushing away the Shadow with its contrary urges. It means you’re exhausted. It means that life feels empty and dry. Where’s the adventure? Where’s the joy? It’s because most of your energy is tied up in the self-negating routine and keeping your various parts sorted and separate from each other. Beyond all this, however, in the unconscious, are vast energy reserves, there for the taking. But watch out–it’s all tied up with the Shadow. The Shadow seethes with energy. And the Shadow is hostile to consciousness. It’s been exiled for so many years; it’s degraded, positively uncivilized. On top of that, it’s resentful about having been rejected. 

This psychic situation is not tenable. There will be a breaking point. But let it be as the poet Anais Nin once said: “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

At some point in anyone’s life, facing their inner Mr. Hyde–their Shadow–is imperative. To heal the radical separation of light and Shadow parts within. To honor the Principle of Yin and Yang and its wisdom of the complementarity of opposites. To mix light and Shadow parts together, as the Tarot’s Temperance card reminds us, so that our character can experience transformation. 

The key piece of advice comes to us from Robert Johnson: “How, then, can one produce something of beauty or goodness without doing an equal amount of wreckage? It is possible to live one’s ideals, do one’s best, be courteous, do well at work, and live a decent civilized life if we ritually acknowledge this other dimension of reality. The unconscious cannot tell the difference between a ‘real’ act and a symbolic one. This means that we can aspire to beauty and goodness- and pay out that darkness in a symbolic way.”

You know, it’s my understanding that Annual Meetings at West Shore were much longer than they are now, in part because they always included something called “The Feast of Fools.” All year long, people at West Shore would be busy living up to the Unitarian Universalist Principles and Purposes and busy working in all sorts of teams and committees, leaders and followers alike. But then would come the Annual Meeting, culminating with “The Feast of Fools,” which was essentially a ritualistic way of letting off steam, of taking a break from all the goodness and all the positive effort. No one was exempt from being roasted and made fun of. Watch out, Board President. Watch out, Music Director. And watch out, Mr. Senior Minister man. It’s just a great illustration of what Robert Johnson is saying we ought to do. We find a way to “pay out the darkness in a symbolic way,” so that our Unitarian Universalist community efforts to do good don’t become too good, too unbalanced, too extreme. 

Let’s stay on this topic of community shadow rituals for a moment more, before we turn to individual shadow rituals. Often in churches, the liturgical solution to encouraging respectful behaviors towards each other is a unison reading of some positive covenant. The classic James Vila Blake covenant goes like this: 

Love is the spirit of this church,

and service is its law.

This is our great covenant:

To dwell together in peace,

To seek the truth in love,

And to help one another.

Don’t get me wrong, I love it. But the solution it proposes to encourage mutually respectful behavior is all light, and in no way is the Shadow side of church community acknowledged and honored. It’s when we can feel tired from always being so good, and we feel the itch to nitpick our fellow congregants instead, we feel the itch to gossip about juicy tidbits, we feel the delicious itch to focus on how this person or that person can be so very irritating. Yes, even Beloved church community has a Shadow side. So, it makes me wonder if, periodically, a better ritual could be that of something like “burying the hatchet.” 

I know, I know–to the Dr. Jekyll all positivity, all goodness sensibility, such a ritual sounds crude and outrageous. But the Mr. Hyde Shadow in each of us will feel tremendously satisfied by that image of the “hatchet” which holds together in one symbol all the ways we might be irritating each other. And then we bury it. Once a year. Discharge all that excess Shadow energy that is going to get discharged anyway but in less constructive ways (through, as I said earlier, nitpicking, gossip, and general crankiness). 

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the [Shadow] conscious.” But, asks Robert Johnson, “Does this mean that I have to be as destructive as I am creative, as dark as I am light? Yes, but I have some control over how or where I will pay the dark price. I can make a ceremony or ritual soon after doing some creative work and restore my balance in that way. This is best done privately and need not injure my environment nor anyone near me.”

So consider this example of how an individual pays the Shadow so as to restore balance. “Dr. Marie-Louise von Franz and Barbara Hannah, who shared a household in Küsnacht, Switzerland, had the custom of requiring whoever had some especially good fortune to carry out the garbage for the week. This is a simple but powerful act. Symbolically speaking, they were playing out the shadow side of something positive.”

Or, go back to that example from Robert Johnson’s own life, when his patience was sorely tested by some friends, he grit his teeth and powered through, but then, later on, before he knew what was happening, he found himself in a fight with an innocent person, he made a fool of himself. His Mr. Hyde popped out and restored psychic balance–restored the balance between Yin and Yang–but the action was destructive. But he could have consciously “picked up his Shadow” in this way. Once he could finally relax and let down his guard, he could have found some private place. It would have taken just 5 minutes to do this Shadow acknowledgement work. He could have gotten a towel, soaked it in water, rolled it up into a ball, threw it on the floor as hard as he could, and yelled. Then again, and then again. Third time is the charm. No one’s going to get hurt by this. That’s the point of Shadow rituals. All he would be doing is honoring the great Principle of Yin and Yang as it touches on everyone’s soul. All he would be doing is honoring the great virtue of Temperance. That is all he would be doing. You too, whenever you engage in a Shadow ritual. 

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the [Shadow] conscious.” We are called by such wisdom to eschew the temptation to spiritually bypass the Shadow parts of our lives and always live in the positive and in the light. But I call the doing of that toxic positivity, and no one can live that way for very long. Because we are who we are. We are creatures of Yin and Yang. We are creatures that must learn the lesson of Temperance, whether the hard way or the easy way. 

“How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow?” Carl Jung once asked. “I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole.” 

This is who we are. Dr. Jekyll AND Mr. Hyde both. But the two can become balanced. 

In wholeness, not just goodness, will we find the enlightenment we seek.