In looking at fears, then, it is well to remember that Carl Jung saw this reservoir of the forbidden inside the shadow as a part of the collective unconscious. The term collective unconscious means that everybody has these thoughts and fantasies. There is nothing unique about any of us when it comes to the way we symbolize our emotions. Everybody secretly harbors the fear that they are dumb, ugly, unlovable, and a failure. The unconscious mind is not polite. It thinks in gross concepts. When it thinks of the phrase "Murder the bum!," the unconscious literally means that. Look deep within yourself the next time somebody cuts you off in traffic, and picture what you would really do to that person if you were strictly honest with yourself and did not censor the image coming to mind. You'd like to run them off the road, wouldn't you? Pulverize them. Push them off the cliff. Isn't that right? That's the way the unconscious thinks. The reason that a sense of humor is useful is because these images are comical once we look at them. There is nothing awful about it; it is just the way the unconscious handles images. It doesn't mean that you are a rotten person or that you are potentially a criminal. It just means that you have gotten honest and faced how the human animal mind operates in this dimension. There is no point in getting melodramatic, self-critical, or tragic about it. The unconscious is crude and uncivilized. While your intellect went to prep school, your unconscious remained in the jungle where it is still swinging in the trees! Looking at the shadow side is not a time to get prissy or squeamish. It's not a time to take it literally either, because the symbols of the unconscious are just that: they are symbols, and they are primitive in nature. If worked with consciously, they can empower us rather than inhibit us.
( David R. Hawkins )
[ Letting Go: The Pathway of ]
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