[Main Blog Post] [Book] Transforming Darkness

[jprussell]

This week, after the possibly synchronicity of folks asking about working with Jung's concept of the Shadow on JMG's Magic Monday right after having read an excerpt of a book on the Shadow, I decided to give it a read. It's called Transforming Darkness, and I found it interesting and helpful, though if you've read much on the subject or done much of such work, you might not find much new here.

As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts here or through email.

Comments

Random thought

[k_a_nitz]

re: "two ends of a spectrum, with intermediate steps in between"

At times I wonder what it would be like if we switched instead to two points in a field with points that may be intermediate or may be off at an angle or some combination thereof. (Field in this sense could have as many dimensions as you wish.)

Re: Random thought

[jprussell]

You know, it's funny you mention that, as one of the things that Davis presents in the book that I didn't talk about in my review, because I didn't find it that useful for my purposes, is a 2x2 with two axes: Internal vs External, and Individual vs Collective.

He apparently based this off of something by Ken Wilber, about whom I've absorbed some of JMG's skepticism, since that was the first place I had heard of him, but it's not a bad model necessarily. In terms of the Shadow, this gives us mental manifestations of the Shadow (Individual+Interior), physical symptoms of repressed feelings (Individual+Exterior), cultural expressions of the Shadow (Collective+Interior), and societal/institutional expressions of the Shadow (Collective+Exterior).

He doesn't quite try to fuse this his Personal to Archetypal spectrum, and perhaps wisely, as it might be an awkward fit, but that's at least one example of applying multiple dimensions to this concept. I suppose the merit of a 1-dimensional spectrum is simplification/focus, and more dimensions will allow you to account for/specify more things, but at the cost of complexity and/or over-specification (such as a model that implies combinations not actually possible in reality).

Re: Random thought

[k_a_nitz]

Yes, I think it is one of those the map is not the territory things. The map is useful, but you need to hold in the back of your mind that it is not the territory and so other maps are possible.

Re: Random thought

[jprussell]

Indeed! Always a useful concept to keep in mind, and always a challenge with our favored maps.