Owning Your Own Shadow

Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche

Robert A Johnson

A bit out there…but a good lesson overall. Johnson explores the need to “own” our own shadow – the dark, hidden part of the ego. This is accomplished by first coming to terms with the shadow, incorporating it and finally aiming to balance it. When I was reading it, I felt that he used lots of left-field jargon, but overall I liked his stance: He views this as a process by which wholeness is restored to the person.

Good, bad and ugly are part of us all. Normally, our culture only makes a comfortable space for the good ones. Becoming intimately whole is partly being able to identify and explore the ugly parts of us too, without the need to hide them away.

Ok, but I wouldn’t run out and find the book.

There is a wonderful saying attributed to Mahatma Gandhi: “If you follow the old code of justice – an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth – you end up with a blind and toothless world.” P. 37

I regret the prevailing attitude at present that goodness or sainthood consists of living as much as possible on the right hand, the good side, of the seesaw. Sainthood has been caricatured as an image of the all-right preson, the person who has transferred everything to the perfect side of his personality. Such a condition would be completely unstable and would flip immediately. The balance would be disrupted and life would be impossible.

The fulcrum, or center point, is the whole (holy) place. I agree that we must relate to the outer world with the refined product of the good side, but this canbe done only by keeping the left side in balance with the right. We must hide our dark side from society in general, or we will be a bloody bore; but we must never try to hide it from ourself. True sainthood-or personal effectiveness-consists in standing at the center of the seesaw and producing only that which can be counterweighted with its opposite. P.14

The balance of light and dark is ultimately possible – and bearable. All nature lives in polarity – light and dark, creation and destruction, up and down, male and female. P. 15

Romulus, My Father

Raimond Gaita

Ironically, I bought a bunch of black-market movies in Boliva and this movie (called Mi Padre) was one of them. In vain, everyone in my family has tried to watch it on all of our TV’s, laptops, Xbox’s, ect…and we couldn’t ever get it to play. I come to an indigenous community and there in the house was this book. Weird.

It is basically a book Gaita wrote in celebration of his father. It’s original form was the eulogy he read at his funeral. Some friends then urged him to try and write a book about their relationship and time together.

His father was born in 1922 in a Romanian speaking part of Yugoslavia. He was born into poverty, having to work hard his entire life. He immigrated to Port Melbourne, Australia in 1950 bringing his new wife and young son, Raimond. The wife turns out to be crazy, leaving her family alone; therefore, Gaita grew up in the home of his father. They worked and survived through years of poverty. In the end, his father becomes mental and dies. Touching story, mainly because it was inspired by love.

Wouldn’t recommend it. Slow read.

We sometimes express our most severe judgment of other people by saying that we will never again speak to them. I never heard my father say that nor can I imagine him saying it. That, perhaps more than anything else, testifies to his unqualified sense of common humanity with everyone he met. His severe judgment often caused pain, but the simple honestly of its expression, together with his unhesitating acceptance of those whom he judged so severely, convinces me that he never intentionally caused suffering to anyone. He was truly a man who would rather suffer evil than do it. P. 207

The philosopher Plato said that those who love and seek wisdom are clinging in recollection to things they once saw. Book jacket