“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.”
-C.G. Jung
The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.”
-C.G. Jung
In practical terms, I notice that something is bothering me, or that there is some unhelpful pattern in the way I live my life, and I sit down and pay attention to how I feel. I do this on the level of individual physical sensations. When thoughts arise, I let them go. When painful feelings arise, I notice the automatic urge to flinch away from them, and I simply allow them to be there, and I experience them fully.
In this way, their function (as "messengers") is fulfilled, and they disappear. As a result, I feel relief and "lightness", a feeling of being relieved of burdens.
The meditation / Buddhist phrase often used is that of "two darts".
The first dart is the "real" affliction. So an easy example is - you wake up with a migraine.
The first dart is real. It's an actual thing.
The second dart though is your response. So in the case of a migraine you might feel all sorts of things: anger that it's happening again, irritation that it's today when you've got so much to do; worry that you've got a brain tumour; sadness that you're going to miss lunch... Insert a hundred similar responses here...
What a meditation practice can do - and what Jung was sort of talking about - is make yourself much more aware of your responses. Although the first "dart" may be "real" and (in our example) you're gunna have a headache no matter what you do, you can relieve the suffering by lessening or even removing altogether the second darts.
There's an often used quote which is attributed to Viktor Frankl (I'm not sure it was actually him...), but:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
This is where some (only some in my experience and opinion) of the power of meditation is realised.
The key distinction seems to be between "pain" (the first dart) and suffering (the second, which is created by resisting the first). The Buddha defined enlightenment as "the end of suffering" (not the end of pain). The pain is still there, and you feel it more keenly than ever -- but it doesn't bother you.
Also, you put this much more succinctly than I did :-)
Shadow work often refers to dredging up feelings you have pushed down as "unacceptable" - anger being a common one. The idea being that shadow work helps you move towards total emotional development by embracing all of your emotional faculties.
From Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender by David R. Hawkins (Chapter 3: The Anatomy of Emotions)
I don’t think “to make something conscious” means to make it clear, but rather to personify it:
* “Hate the sin, love the sinner”
* “Don’t hate the player, hate the game”
* “People don’t have ideas, ideas have people”
* “Memes should be considered as living structures, not just metaphorically”
At least in my opinion.
The most popular religion in the world is based on fall from grace, original sin that we must attone for to become pure again. Alternative is that there is no going back and no perfect world or state of mind ahead, only the reality, which is sometimes dirty and messy and for many of us hard to see clearly.
> In some sense, I believed in the devil before I believed in God.
To unpack that a bit, he said suffering is the most real thing there is, and was obsessed with understanding how the unprecedented evil of the 20th century happened. That led him to reason that if evil like that can exist, its opposite might also exist, and has been finding his way to God ever since.
"Stand at the brink of the abyss of despair, and when you see that you cannot bear it anymore, draw back a little and have a cup of tea" ~Elder Sophrony of Essex