Me and my Shadow

[Teacher]

One day, a prominent Indian spiritual master, Krishnamurti, was conducting a conversation, and someone from the audience stood up to ask a question:

- I want the world to be at peace. I hate war! What can I do to bring peace?

“Stop being the cause of the war,” Krishnamurti replied.

The questioner was clearly dumbfounded:

- But I do not support the war! I only want peace!

Krishnamurti shook his head.

- Within you is the cause of all wars. This cruelty of yours, hidden and denied, leads to wars of all kinds, whether it be a war within your family, against other members of society or between nations.

Leave the fantasies about showing the world how you are right and how others are wrong. Spiritual teachers have been giving this advice for centuries. Remember what the Vedas preach: "You are not in the world. The world is in you."

Wholeness does not become real until the latent conflicts in your life are resolved.

• The conflict between security and defenselessness,

• Conflict between love and fear,

• Conflict between desire and need,

• Conflict between acceptance and rejection,

• Conflict between the One and the Multiple.

These conflicts trap everyone, extending far beyond the individual.

? Security versus insecurity.

Solution: be firm in your true self.

What does it take to feel secure in an unstable world that you cannot control? Great sages and teachers based their response on the fundamental axiom that duality is defenseless and wholeness is protected. This is one of the great forgotten lessons. You will feel protected when you find that you have a deep essence. As we have seen before, it resides in your source.

There is no separation in the source, and therefore the outside world cannot threaten the inside. Anxiety needs an external focus, be it a memory of some past trauma or a wandering fear that arises simply because you don't know what will happen next. Your essential self is stable and eternal, so it has nothing to fear from change. The unknown is essential for change. When you come to terms with this fact, the world will turn from a place of constant risk to a playground of surprise.

? Love versus fear.

Solution: Unite with love as an inner strength.

Once you feel protected, you understand that you have a right to be where you are. However, to feel truly "your own" in this world, you must feel loved. Love is the assurance that you are being taken care of. Its opposite, which many people feel, is that you are a random speck of dust that is thrown back and forth in a chaotic world.

"Stop looking for true love. Be it!" What does it take to be true love? What does it mean to find love within yourself? Love does not require seeking. Like the air you breathe, it exists as part of nature; it is a given. However, like any aspect of your innermost self, it can be disguised.

To find love, you must be able to see yourself as someone you can love. The innermost self takes a simple point of view - "I am love", because in its source it is exactly what you are. But in a world of conflicting values, this simple statement becomes confusing and complex. The fog of illusion creates fear. Take away the fear, and what remains is love.

? Desire versus necessity.

Solution: awareness without choice.

The deepest wisdom of the Indian teachings is that there is a state known as "choiceless awareness." At first glance, this seems to be synonymous with the word "rejection". You don't make a choice - you refuse to take sides.

It should be clear that awareness without choice is not giving up what you want. It is switching your loyalty from what the ego wants to what the universe wants. In choiceless awareness, you let your mind make all decisions. In other words, what you want is also the best you can want. In this state of awareness, according to the ancient rishis, there is no internal or external resistance. Nature supports your desires through the cosmic force known as dharma.

Only awareness without choice puts an end to this conflict, because when you reach this level of consciousness, what you want is also what you have to do for your own good and the good of the whole world. With choiceless awareness, there is no need for someone to teach you the rules of dharma. Instead, you have assimilated the dharma - you are really living the axiom: "I am not in the world. The world is in me."

You cannot satisfy your ego by giving it whatever it wants, because the whole purpose of the ego's existence is accumulation. It wants more money, property, status, love, power, etc. etc. Your true self has no ego. You are not aiming to win; you are not afraid of losing. When you give yourself, you are not slowly calculating what you will receive in return.

? Acceptance versus rejection.

Solution: unlimited awareness.

The fear of rejection cripples millions of people. He makes unrequited love a tragedy, understandable to any culture. Spiritually speaking, you cannot be rejected until you reject yourself. I doubt any other idea has been equally misunderstood: when someone rejects you, the pain feels like it's from the outside, and you become a victim in your own eyes. Thus, in order to uncover the mechanism of rejection, we must take a deeper look at the whole problem of judgment. This topic is not new, but there is a lot to add to it. Any judgment comes down to judgment against oneself. Self-condemnation takes many forms, such as fear of failure, feelings of being sacrificed, general lack of confidence, etc. Most of the time, there is only a vague feeling that "I am not good enough" or "no matter how much I have achieved,

Many people come up with a fake solution to this problem. They come up with an ideal image, and then try to live according to it and convince the world that this is what they are.

The speech of the idealized self-image sounds like an ideal of acceptance. Listen to what he tells you: "You are doing the right thing! You are in control. No one can harm you. Just continue to be the way you are now." Protected by such a shield, you can hardly do wrong, and if you do, your sins are instantly covered up and forgotten. The beauty of having your perfect self is that you are truly happy with who you are. The image serves as a substitute for painful reality.

As you can imagine, the shadows have something to say about this. At regular intervals, this or that "icon of righteousness", usually a preacher or famous moralist, gets caught up in a scandalous story. These people, without options, find themselves guilty of precisely those sins for which others were blamed; inappropriate sexual misconduct is the most common occurrence.

In fact, fallen idols are extreme examples of an idealized self-image. They have a truly superhuman capacity for denial. Shadow? What are you, the shadow could not touch them! And then, when the shadow really manifests itself in the open, along with it, a monstrous feeling of guilt and shame floats out. Once the fall occurs, these professional saints indulge in the extremes of public repentance. Even their repentance is nothing real.

Disarming your ideal image is difficult because it is a much more subtle shield than simple denial. Denial is blindness; the idealized self is pure temptation. The way out of this is to bypass the stage of creating any images. There is no need to protect who you really are. Your true self is worthy of acceptance, not because you are so good, but because you are a complete person. And nothing human is alien to you.

The most important of your allies is awareness. Condemnation suffocates. When you label yourself or someone else as being bad, unrighteous, mean, unworthy, etc., you are looking through a narrow lens. Expand your vision - and you realize that every person, no matter how flawed, is complete and whole at the deepest level. The more conscious you are, the more you accept yourself. As you see yourself more fully, you will feel empathy for your shortcomings, which will lead to full acceptance.

? One versus multiple.

Solution: submit to being.

Finally we got to the war in your soul. As you approach your true self, you begin to feel that you are part of everything. Borders soften and disappear. A blissful sense of fusion comes. As wonderful as this experience is, at this moment one final obstacle rears its head. The ego says, "What about me? I don't want to die!" - like the wicked witch from "The Wizard of the Emerald City", whose last words were: "I'm melting! I'm melting! ..." Ego has brought you incredible benefits. It guided you through a world of endless variety. Now you are ready to experience oneness. It is not surprising that the ego feels a fatal threat to itself; it sees its usefulness (and its reign) coming to an end!

The ego confuses rejection with death. Being whole includes denial. You give up one way of seeing yourself, and a new way dawns in its place. "Refusal" is an unwelcome guest for the ego, as it is associated with failure, loss of control, passivity, and the end of reign. When you lose an argument, don't you give up your position in favor of the winner? Of course! Any situation phrased in terms of victory and defeat makes refusal seem weak, shameful, depressing, and unworthy. However, all these feelings exist at the level of the ego. Viewed outside the ego, rejection becomes natural and desirable. A mother who gives her children what they need loses nothing, although someone might say that she is giving up her needs in favor of her children. Such a view would be untrue.

When you give yourself out of love, you have nothing to lose! In fact, loving rejection is akin to acquiring. Your sense of "I" extends beyond ego-driven needs and desires - these will never lead to love!

The shadow is not a terrible enemy, but a worthy one. As powerful as the shadow may be, the power of wholeness is infinitely greater, and thanks to the miracle of creation, it is within your reach.