Introduction

We need a way to understand the prevalence of evil in the world as well as our persistent ability to often sabotage our own best efforts. Many of the new spiritualities assume that if we only stay with Love and ignore all the shadow side of life, this is all that is necessary. Love will overcome Fear and Hate and all negatives. Maybe so. I find good and sincere people sabotaging relationships, outside their awareness.
Even the Apostle Paul said: "I cannot understand my own behavior. I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and find myself doing the things I hate." In the same paragraph, Romans 7, Paul called this tendency his unspiritual self: although the will to do what is good is in him, the performance is not.
I know from my own life that I have not paid enough attention to what Carl Jung calls the Human Shadow. The Shadow is the hidden part of our personality. It consists of the characteristics, impulses, programs, scripts, and psychological games that are not welcome in our conscious life. The Shadow self includes the pervasive ways we hide from ourselves and from our motives.
The Shadow is not only personal, that is, the result of my individual life, but cultural. Jung proposed that there were archetypes, a sort of story-template that guides our conscious minds. The hidden program shapes personality in many ways. I am taught what is right and what is wrong. What is unacceptable, for example, sexual desire for a celibate, then goes into the shadow where it becomes more powerful.
Our Western Caucasian culture relegates a great deal of our feeling function to the shadow, so it is not proper for men, at least, to be forthright with feelings, either positive or negative.
Our spiritual task is to not be afraid of what is in the shadow, but to welcome it, embrace it, see it as a valuable part of ourselves, and learn to integrate this. When this happens we are more whole, less scared of the interior life, also more humble as it teaches us what is common to our humanity.
In marriage, for instance, it usually takes more than a few years to realize how different were the families in which we and our spouses were raised, with different assumptions and expectations about almost everything. We are only in the past few years discovering how differently we are programed from the time we are labeled blue and pink in the hospital nursery.
The dangerous persons are those who assume because they are so sincere, they cannot be wrong and further, should not be questioned. The most dangerous today are those who believe that "God" is on their side. Their righteousness with God gives them the permission to judge others as further from God than themselves. The gift of faith has become an hidden idol.