Ken Wilber and the Shadow Self
We all have a desire to protect the vulnerable, as we all recognize innately that we all once were vulnerable too. We all are also biological human beings who have a need to breathe, eat, drink, excrete and probably at a bare minimum a desire to do other things including hugging and kissing. We all recognize on some level that a violation of bodily autonomy is wrong, even if there are vast arguments about whose body it may be in cases of abortion.
So how have we ended up with two people divided on vastly different sides, to the point of screaming at each other and perhaps never talking again to even cherished loved ones? I’ve read some things on psychology and philosophy, but Ken Wilber’s “Spectrum of Consciousness” was my red pill moment. The book is biblical in its depth and implications. It’s had me pondering a lot of what Wilber had said about the shadow self.
This article explains it fairly well
“Wilber’s integral model emphasises — as did Carl Jung — that in order to optimise the level of consciousness you are operating at, so to ensure you are part of the social solution rather than part of the problem, you will need to own and integrate your shadow tendencies.”
The shadow is parts of your being that you are uncomfortable with and thus cast away as dark and forbidden. They can be many things to many people from repressed sexual urges to feelings of inadequacy. It then becomes unconscious that you ever had those things as part of you to begin with.
“The troubling thing about any unconscious process is this very feature — its unconsciousness. The fact of the matter is, when negative attitudes, feelings and impulses are disowned, they are literally disassociated from, and exist below the level of awareness completely…
Yet strangely the story won’t end there. The disowned traits will then cross the self-boundary, and appear as the things, and people outside of us, that rankle us greatly. For instance, disowned hostile feelings, may appear as a distorted perception of hostility existing in our environment, and manifest as acute paranoia. Repressed sexual impulses, may be projected as an obsessive hatred and judgement of certain sexual behaviours.”
Once this shadow part of yourself is cast away and othered, it projects into a negative, deep and irrational hatred of other people that you see doing that thing, whatever the thing is. This has been there for all of human history. A rich man and a beggar, long ago classmates and friends, come to despise each other. The beggar hates the rich man and claims that it is because of all the unfair advantages that this man had in life. What he really has repressed and cast out are his adolescent urgings to take responsibility for himself and others, which led to him selling drugs when he was young. The rich man, meanwhile, despises the beggar as a loathsome castoff on the street, who got there through his own bad choices. What he really has repressed is his repulsion that he was once physically nurtured and supported by his mother in early childhood and was supported financially by his father in his early business dealings. Accusations about the other in both cases reflect a true part of the other. But they cannot accept that part of themselves. So the shadow becomes seen in that other person they hate.
“There are all sorts of strange twistings of unconscious internal realities into distorted external realities, that occur as a result of shadow denial and projection. Probably the simplest way to identify the unconscious content of the Shadow, is to assume that the opposite of what you strongly desire or detest is also true. If for instance you absolutely feel repulsed by men wearing cargo shorts and wraparound sunglasses, be aware that there is another part of you attracted to men wearing cargo shorts and wraparound sunglasses. I certainly had to.
Curiously, as Ken Wilber has described, shadow projecting is relatively easy to spot for anyone other than the shadow projector. What you tend to see is a person having an emotionally charged response to an event or a person, that seems rather exaggerated. Having a million-dollar reaction, to a one-dollar situation you could say. But to identify our own projections really seems to require meditating on our reactions, moments when we are feeling triggered, and find ways to trace and ideally retract these shadow tendencies.”
I certainly have heard of one million dollar reactions to one dollar situations since Covidcon, as something as innocuous as wearing a facemask or not became an intimate battleground. I’ve seen videos of people getting physically assaulted for not wearing one, which sort of violates the whole purpose even if you did believe in the science behind them. I’ve seen people near spitting their rage in some situation at the hated other, who is, in this situation, some part of themselves. It has to be, as it is biologically impossible to wear a facemask at all times in all situations.
In Thailand nobody was spitting at me in rage over not wearing a facemask in public. Perhaps this is because shadow projections are understood in Buddhist philosophy. Thais did treat it as an act of disrespect like it was an affront to their culture, a culture which was global and didn’t exist until a little over 2 years ago. It could be best explained by this music video from Aviccii with the people in the town basically looking at me exactly like this:
Shadow projections are just one in a series of of social manipulations that have come about as a result of Covidcon. It’s like they took the CIA cookbook from every dark twisted psychological experiment ever done in order to influence mass perception and conformity. They had the Asch Conformity results in there, and Milgram’s compliance study, and the Stanford Prison Experiment. On and on I could go. But if someone is spitting on someone else in irrational hatred of their noncompliance with some part of this psyop, I see shadows…
Have you had any experiences of being excluded due to these restrictions?