The Shadow of the Enlightened Guru

[♀♥Lady Urania♥♀]

The Shadow of the Enlightened Guru

by Georg Feuerstein

In his book The Lotus and the Robot, Arthur Koestler tells of an incident that happened while he was sitting at the feet of the female Indian guru Anandamayi Ma, who is venerated by tens of thousands of Hindus as an incarnation of the Divine. An old woman approached the dais and begged Anandamaya Ma to intercede for her son, who had been missing in action after a recent border incident. The saint ignored her completely. When the woman became hysterical, Anandamaya Ma dismissed her rather harshly, which was a signal to the attendants to swiftly conduct the woman out of the room.

Koestler was taken aback by Anandamaya Ma's indifference  to the woman's suffering. He concluded that the saint was, at least in the moment, lacking compassion. He found it perplexing that an allegedly enlightened being, acting spontaneously out of the fullness of the Divine, should display such abruptness and seeming callousness. This story highlights the fact that even supposedly 'perfect' beings can and do engage in actions that seem to contradict their followers' idealized image of them.

Some 'perfect' masters are notorious for their angry outbursts, others for their authoritarianism. Of late a number of allegedly celibate super-gurus have made headlines for their clandestine sexual relationships with women followers. Spiritual geniuses-- saints, sages, and mystics-- are not immune to neurotic traits or to having experiences much like psychotic states. Indeed, even apparently enlightened adepts can be subject to personality characteristics that consensus opinion finds undesirable.

That the personality of enlightened beings and advanced mystics remains largely intact is obvious when one examines biographies and autobiographies of adepts, past and present. Each one manifests specific psychological qualities, as determined by his or her genetics and life history. Some are gentle, others fierce. Some have no interest in learning, others are great scholars. What these fully awakened beings have in common is that they no longer identify with the personality complex, however it may be configured, but live out of the identity of the Self. Enlightenment, then, consists in the transcendence of the ego-habit, but enlightenment does not obliterate the personality. If it did, we would be justified in equating it with psychosis.

The fact that the basic personality structure is essentially the same after enlightenment as it was before raises the crucial question of whether enlightenment also leaves untouched traits that in the unenlightened individual might be called neurotic. I believe that this is so. If they are true teachers, their overriding purpose can be expected to be the communication of the transcendental Reality. Yet, their behavior is, in the outside world, always a matter of personal style.

Devotees, of course, like to think that their ideal guru is free from whims and that apparent idiosyncrasies must be for the sake of teaching others. But a moment's reflection would show this to be based in fantasy and projection.

Some teachers have claimed that their conduct reflects the psychic state of those with whom they come in contact, that their sometimes curious exploits are, in other words, triggered by disciples. This may be, because enlightened adepts are like chameleons. But much mirroring still proceeds along personal lines. For instance, some gurus will not sit on garbage heaps, consume human flesh (as did the modern Tantric master Vimalanada), or meditate on corpses to instruct others, while few of those who engage in such practices would consider training their intellects or acquiring musical skills in order to serve a disciple better.

The personality of the adept is, to be sure, oriented toward self-transcendence rather than self-fulfillment. However, it is characteristically not on a self-actualizing trajectory, I use self-actualization here in a more restricted sense than it was intended by Abraham Maslow: as the intention toward realizing psychic wholeness based on the integration of the shadow. The shadow, in Jungian terms, is a dark aspect of the personality, the aggregate of repressed materials. The individual shadow is ineluctably tied up with the collective shadow. This integration is not a one-and-for-all event but a lifelong process. It can occur either prior to enlightenment or afterward. If integration is not a conscious program of the pre-enlightened personality, it is also unlikely to form part of the personality after enlightenment, because of the relative stability of the personality structures.

The claim has been made by some contemporary adepts that in the breakthrough of enlightenment, the shadow is entirely flooded with the light of supraconsciousness. The implication is that the enlightened being is without shadow. This is difficult to accept as a statement about the conditional personality. The shadow is the product of the near-infinite permutations of unconscious processes that are essential to human life as we know it. While the personality is experiencing life, unconscious content is formed simply because no one can be continuously aware of everthing.

The uprooting of the ego-identity in enlightenment does not terminate the processes of attention: it merely ends the anchorage of attention to to ego. Moreover, the enlightened being continues to think and emote, which inevitably leaves an unconscious residue even when there is no inner attachment to these processes. The important difference is that this residue is not experienced as a hindrance to ego-transcendence simply because this is an ongoing process in the enlightened condition.

A few adepts have resolved this issue by admitting that there is a phantom ego, a vestigial personality center, even after awakening as the universal Reality. If we accept this proposition, then we cold perhaps also speak of the existence of a phantom shadow or a vestigial shadow, which permits the enlightened being to function in the dimension of conditional reality. In the unenlightened individual, ego and shadow go together; we can postulate an analogous polarization between phantom ego and phantom shadow after enlightenment.

Even if we were to assume that enlightenment illumines and evaporates the shadow, we must still seriously question whether this illumination corresponds to integration- the basis for higher self-transformation. This means that it involves intentional change in the direction of psychic wholeness that can be observed by others. When I examine the lives of contemporary adepts claiming to be enlightened, I do not see evidence that such integration is being done. One of the first indications would be a visible willingness not only to reflect disciples back to themselves, but also have disciples be a mirror for the adept's further growth. However, this kind of willingness calls for an openness that is precluded by the authoritarian style adopted by most gurus.

The traditional spiritual paths are by and large grounded in the vertical ideal of liberation from the conditioning of the body-mind. Therefore, they focus on what is conceived to be the ultimate good--transcendental Being. This spiritual single-mindedness jars the human psyche out of focus: its personal concerns become insignificnt and its structures are viewed as something to be transcended as quickly as possible rather than transformed. Of course, all self-transcending methods involve a degree of self-transformation. But, as a rule, this does not entail a concerted effort to work with the shadow to accomplish psychic integration. This may explain why so many mystics and adepts are highly eccentric and authoritarian and appear socially to have weakly integrated personalities.

Unlike transcendence, integration occurs in the horizontal plane. It extends the ideal of wholeness to the conditional personality and its social nexus. Yet, integration makes sense only when the conditional personality and the conditional world are not treated as irrevocable opponents of the Ultimate Reality but are valued as manifestations of it.

Having discovered the Divine in the depths of his or her own soul, the adept must then find the Divine in all life. This is, the adept's first principle obligation and responsibility. To put it differently, having drunk of the fountain of life, the adept must complete the spiritual opus and practice compassion on the basis of the recognition that everything participates in the universal field of the Divine.

[songbird]

The personality of the adept is, to be sure, oriented toward self-transcendence rather than self-fulfillment. However, it is characteristically not on a self-actualizing trajectory, I use self-actualization here in a more restricted sense than it was intended by Abraham Maslow: as the intention toward realizing psychic wholeness based on the integration of the shadow. The shadow, in Jungian terms, is a dark aspect of the personality, the aggregate of repressed materials. The individual shadow is ineluctably tied up with the collective shadow.


The claim has been made by some contemporary adepts that in the breakthrough of enlightenment, the shadow is entirely flooded with the light of supraconsciousness. The implication is that the enlightened being is without shadow. This is difficult to accept as a statement about the conditional personality. The shadow is the product of the near-infinite permutations of unconscious processes that are essential to human life as we know it. While the personality is experiencing life, unconscious content is formed simply because no one can be continuously aware of everthing.

The uprooting of the ego-identity in enlightenment does not terminate the processes of attention: it merely ends the anchorage of attention to to ego. Moreover, the enlightened being continues to think and emote, which inevitably leaves an unconscious residue even when there is no inner attachment to these processes. The important difference is that this residue is not experienced as a hindrance to ego-transcendence simply because this is an ongoing process in the enlightened condition.


Even if we were to assume that enlightenment illumines and evaporates the shadow, we must still seriously question whether this illumination corresponds to integration- the basis for higher self-transformation. This means that it involves intentional change in the direction of psychic wholeness that can be observed by others. 

Unlike transcendence, integration occurs in the horizontal plane. It extends the ideal of wholeness to the conditional personality and its social nexus. Yet, integration makes sense only when the conditional personality and the conditional world are not treated as irrevocable opponents of the Ultimate Reality but are valued as manifestations of it.

Having discovered the Divine in the depths of his or her own soul, the adept must then find the Divine in all life. This is, the adept's first principle obligation and responsibility. To put it differently, having drunk of the fountain of life, the adept must complete the spiritual opus and practice compassion on the basis of the recognition that everything participates in the universal field of the Divine.

So basically, once I realize my own shadow and integrate it, (in dreaming most likely) the shadowy aspects of others, as I see them, should also become integrated to?  That is, I will stop projecting my shadow onto them, and thus stop seeing negative dark aspects of others that I don't like.  Also possibly stop attracting shadowy figures into my life.

 

[Lori Anne]

The Shadow Connection


We are each a collection of many different aspects, each of them contributing to our unfolding path of reconnection to Source and re-membering our physical, emotional, spiritual and mental bodies into wholeness. Within the plane of polarity which is the third dimensional experience, each thing has its opposite, beginning with love and fear, which is one aspect of what we know as light and darkness. These are expressed in continuously shifting proportions, whose balance depends on the experiences we have chosen for our lifetime’s journey of learning and understanding. There is a space in between our light and darkness, which contains everything we need to know to propel us into the path of our choosing. This is our shadow and although we can be afraid of what it contains, it is also an aspect of our being.

We are not, at any time, fully light or fully dark. Rather, we live in the shadow, a place that is in between the two, a middle place where we experience the proportional balance of light and darkness that we carry. Within the shadow is all of our pain, suffering, and fear, as well as the knowledge, understanding, and love that we need to bring enlightenment to our path. It is in the shadow that our transformation occurs and understanding our shadow connection is the key to understanding the purpose and meaning of our journey.

Since we are on a journey of reconnection and movement from the darkness to the light, we believe that the dark is the bad and light is good, so we run from the dark, afraid to face its lessons and blessings, unwilling to acknowledge the aspects of ourselves which we believe make us unworthy of the Light. We believe that unless we are all light, we are all dark and yet there is no understanding in either of those polarities. It is just as impossible for us to see in the presence of a light is too bright as it is for us to see in total darkness. Yet it is that glimmer of light in the darkness that allows us to see the shadows, where we can begin to understand where we are and what we are doing. The shadow is our helper, our vehicle of understanding on the earth plane and without it this journey is not possible.   

What lives within our shadow? Everything that we have ever experienced until this moment in time. Why is it so valuable? Without understanding the shadow we can run in circles, forgetting what we have already learned and repeating that which we no longer need to experience. Instead of fearing the shadow we can bless it, learn from it and embrace it because it is both our humanity and our light, what we love and hate about ourselves, the sum of all of the light and all of the darkness we have ever created. We see examples of its many manifestations in our physical reality. On a warm day we are grateful for the shadow which offers relief from the hot sun. Yet on another day that same shadow can be cold and uninviting. The shadow is the same, but the context is different.   

It is not the shadow that we fear, it is our memories and experience of some of the shadow’s aspects that keep us from looking at it more closely. Since the memory of the shadow is part of our mental and emotional body what we far are the possibilities that the shadow could hold. Ultimately, we fear the possibility that within the shadow we are outside of the light and in the darkness. Yet the shadow, like everything else, is a combination of light and dark, and it is just a thing that is powerless without the interpretation of our feelings, beliefs, thoughts and desires. The power lies in our ability to find the light within the shadow and make the connection to its light aspects and not to the darkness.

On an energetic level, our shadow holds a range of vibrations and we can be within any aspect of this range, according to our level of spiritual knowledge and understanding. Our objective is simply to find the balance between dark and light, fear and love, chaos and peace, that allows for the next step in our spiritual growth and understanding. This is our dance, one in which we look for the balance between dark and light that allows us to learn, heal grow and ascend so we learn to make the decisions and choices that support this mission.

As we move through a lifetime we see our shadow reflected in everything—every thought and belief, every person and experience, every choice we make and even the potential realities we can see as available to us. They are all created through and limited by our shadow and how we choose to view it. This determines whether we see our shadow as a wonderful vehicle of understanding and a way to reconcile our experience of polarity or fear it and its potential. In this way we see our shadow as either working for us or against us, and we are either flowing with its learning or fighting it every step of the way.

In any lifetime where we have taken on too much darkness, which includes lifetimes where we have experienced any kind of trauma, our balance of light and dark is disrupted, the shadow takes on more darkness and it is harder to find the light within it. But it is still there—without the light we are unable to see the shadow. Each time we look for the light in the shadow, we shed light on it and transform its vibration. The shadow is our connection to both our Self and to Source, the missing link in our understanding of what we have chosen to experience and how we experience it. It is a doorway to our soul healing that provides us with both the questions we need to ask and the answers to them.

To better understand our shadow connection and what it means to us in terms of our healing we need to embrace it as a part of the whole, allow ourselves to be in the place of understanding with compassion and sympathy and then follow the light we find there. No matter how small we think it is, the light is always present and through it we can create the balance that we seek that will bring peace to our chaos, embrace ourselves with love and acceptance and remember that we are bringing light to the world through everything that we are willing to do for ourselves.

Copyright (C) 2004 - 2008 by Jennifer Hoffman

[lavender orchid]

The Shadow of the Enlightened Guru

by Georg Feuerstein

In his book The Lotus and the Robot, Arthur Koestler tells of an incident that happened while he was sitting at the feet of the female Indian guru Anandamayi Ma, who is venerated by tens of thousands of Hindus as an incarnation of the Divine. An old woman approached the dais and begged Anandamaya Ma to intercede for her son, who had been missing in action after a recent border incident. The saint ignored her completely. When the woman became hysterical, Anandamaya Ma dismissed her rather harshly, which was a signal to the attendants to swiftly conduct the woman out of the room.

Koestler was taken aback by Anandamaya Ma's indifference  to the woman's suffering. He concluded that the saint was, at least in the moment, lacking compassion. He found it perplexing that an allegedly enlightened being, acting spontaneously out of the fullness of the Divine, should display such abruptness and seeming callousness. This story highlights the fact that even supposedly 'perfect' beings can and do engage in actions that seem to contradict their followers' idealized image of them.

Some 'perfect' masters are notorious for their angry outbursts, others for their authoritarianism. Of late a number of allegedly celibate super-gurus have made headlines for their clandestine sexual relationships with women followers. Spiritual geniuses-- saints, sages, and mystics-- are not immune to neurotic traits or to having experiences much like psychotic states. Indeed, even apparently enlightened adepts can be subject to personality characteristics that consensus opinion finds undesirable.

That the personality of enlightened beings and advanced mystics remains largely intact is obvious when one examines biographies and autobiographies of adepts, past and present. Each one manifests specific psychological qualities, as determined by his or her genetics and life history. Some are gentle, others fierce. Some have no interest in learning, others are great scholars. What these fully awakened beings have in common is that they no longer identify with the personality complex, however it may be configured, but live out of the identity of the Self. Enlightenment, then, consists in the transcendence of the ego-habit, but enlightenment does not obliterate the personality. If it did, we would be justified in equating it with psychosis.

The fact that the basic personality structure is essentially the same after enlightenment as it was before raises the crucial question of whether enlightenment also leaves untouched traits that in the unenlightened individual might be called neurotic. I believe that this is so. If they are true teachers, their overriding purpose can be expected to be the communication of the transcendental Reality. Yet, their behavior is, in the outside world, always a matter of personal style.

Devotees, of course, like to think that their ideal guru is free from whims and that apparent idiosyncrasies must be for the sake of teaching others. But a moment's reflection would show this to be based in fantasy and projection.

Some teachers have claimed that their conduct reflects the psychic state of those with whom they come in contact, that their sometimes curious exploits are, in other words, triggered by disciples. This may be, because enlightened adepts are like chameleons. But much mirroring still proceeds along personal lines. For instance, some gurus will not sit on garbage heaps, consume human flesh (as did the modern Tantric master Vimalanada), or meditate on corpses to instruct others, while few of those who engage in such practices would consider training their intellects or acquiring musical skills in order to serve a disciple better.

The personality of the adept is, to be sure, oriented toward self-transcendence rather than self-fulfillment. However, it is characteristically not on a self-actualizing trajectory, I use self-actualization here in a more restricted sense than it was intended by Abraham Maslow: as the intention toward realizing psychic wholeness based on the integration of the shadow. The shadow, in Jungian terms, is a dark aspect of the personality, the aggregate of repressed materials. The individual shadow is ineluctably tied up with the collective shadow. This integration is not a one-and-for-all event but a lifelong process. It can occur either prior to enlightenment or afterward. If integration is not a conscious program of the pre-enlightened personality, it is also unlikely to form part of the personality after enlightenment, because of the relative stability of the personality structures.

The claim has been made by some contemporary adepts that in the breakthrough of enlightenment, the shadow is entirely flooded with the light of supraconsciousness. The implication is that the enlightened being is without shadow. This is difficult to accept as a statement about the conditional personality. The shadow is the product of the near-infinite permutations of unconscious processes that are essential to human life as we know it. While the personality is experiencing life, unconscious content is formed simply because no one can be continuously aware of everthing.

The uprooting of the ego-identity in enlightenment does not terminate the processes of attention: it merely ends the anchorage of attention to to ego. Moreover, the enlightened being continues to think and emote, which inevitably leaves an unconscious residue even when there is no inner attachment to these processes. The important difference is that this residue is not experienced as a hindrance to ego-transcendence simply because this is an ongoing process in the enlightened condition.

A few adepts have resolved this issue by admitting that there is a phantom ego, a vestigial personality center, even after awakening as the universal Reality. If we accept this proposition, then we cold perhaps also speak of the existence of a phantom shadow or a vestigial shadow, which permits the enlightened being to function in the dimension of conditional reality. In the unenlightened individual, ego and shadow go together; we can postulate an analogous polarization between phantom ego and phantom shadow after enlightenment.

Even if we were to assume that enlightenment illumines and evaporates the shadow, we must still seriously question whether this illumination corresponds to integration- the basis for higher self-transformation. This means that it involves intentional change in the direction of psychic wholeness that can be observed by others. When I examine the lives of contemporary adepts claiming to be enlightened, I do not see evidence that such integration is being done. One of the first indications would be a visible willingness not only to reflect disciples back to themselves, but also have disciples be a mirror for the adept's further growth. However, this kind of willingness calls for an openness that is precluded by the authoritarian style adopted by most gurus.

The traditional spiritual paths are by and large grounded in the vertical ideal of liberation from the conditioning of the body-mind. Therefore, they focus on what is conceived to be the ultimate good--transcendental Being. This spiritual single-mindedness jars the human psyche out of focus: its personal concerns become insignificnt and its structures are viewed as something to be transcended as quickly as possible rather than transformed. Of course, all self-transcending methods involve a degree of self-transformation. But, as a rule, this does not entail a concerted effort to work with the shadow to accomplish psychic integration. This may explain why so many mystics and adepts are highly eccentric and authoritarian and appear socially to have weakly integrated personalities.

Unlike transcendence, integration occurs in the horizontal plane. It extends the ideal of wholeness to the conditional personality and its social nexus. Yet, integration makes sense only when the conditional personality and the conditional world are not treated as irrevocable opponents of the Ultimate Reality but are valued as manifestations of it.

Having discovered the Divine in the depths of his or her own soul, the adept must then find the Divine in all life. This is, the adept's first principle obligation and responsibility. To put it differently, having drunk of the fountain of life, the adept must complete the spiritual opus and practice compassion on the basis of the recognition that everything participates in the universal field of the Divine.

[/color]

thank you very much, my Lady, i41 can only appreciate this.