[Main Blog Post] [Book] Thoughts on Shadow Tech

[jprussell]

As mentioned in an earlier post, I recently read Shadow Tech by Colin E. Davis and Melissa Mari, and now I've put my thoughts together on it. Altogether, a helpful book, but as is often the case, I found myself wanting more straightforwardly hands-on advice than I found here (but that might be a personal failing).

Comments

[jprussell]

Ah, that is another interesting angle to bring to it. I think that both the idea that there's no such thing as "negative" emotions, but also that we need to be careful what we tune ourselves into, have merit to them. I didn't get much into it in this review, but the latter view has more to do with Davis and Mari's thoughts on the wider patterns of "negative" energy we get caught up in. This gets into some "interesting" (that is to say, incredibly hard to reason about or come to a satisfying conclusion about) territory when your metaphysics get beyond the material. One typical way of sorting through this is to say that emotions don't "count," only what you do with them on a material level - so, when you get angry, do you start blasting, or bite it back and act pleasant anyway? Many more materially-grounded systems of ethics would say that's the real test, but if you believe that the ostensibly pleasant person seething with rage inside may be having some kind of astral or etheric effect on those around him, it becomes a very different matter. As you say, I don't really have any answers either, but books like this are helping me to frame up some questions.

As for your second point, okay, yes, you got me, I was sloppy with my language. As a longtime fan of the Stoics, I should have been more careful saying anyone or anything can "make" us angry. Fundamentally, it's our choice how to respond to the stimuli we encounter. My own reading of the Stoic approach (which I suspect influenced the New Thought folks who in turn influenced NLP) is that there's a difference between the "immediate" response to external stimuli and the considered, conscious response. Someone acting like a jerk may cause a flare up of anger that you feel somewhere in your person (in the thumos most likely, by the Stoic model), but it's then up to your conscious mind how much to "own" that anger or indulge in it. In modern times, this is pretty much how Cognitive Behavioral Therapy approaches things, which was very explicitly influenced by the Stoics, and from my own experience, there's a lot of merit there. The idea is that over time, the conscious decision-making about what to "do" with more-or-less involuntary responses to external stimuli seeps down into the less-conscious parts of ourselves, and eventually, you don't even have the flare up, or its at least much smaller. On the other hand, it strikes me that such an approach has its potential flaws: it might be prone to putting bandaids on bigger wounds (such as never getting at why some class of stimuli provokes an anger response), attempting to tamp down feelings by brute force (rather than defusing or weakening them), and, as you say, maybe it's counter-productive in the long run to treat your conscious self as the sole driver that can or should work such things out. And all of that isn't even touching the idea that sometimes you should get angry (or sad, or aggressive, or whatever).

Another thought I just realized I didn't include in the review, and should have, is that books like this tend to focus on the "obvious" stuff that tends to get stuffed into the Shadow - negative emotions, "bad" desires, and so forth - while leaving out possibly equally important things that might less often end up in the Shadow, but deserve to be dealt with if they end up there. At the risk of going too personal, not too long ago, I had a realization that "being helpless" is something I've likely shoved into my own Shadow. I've long known that I don't like being helpless, and that I tend to favor approaches that emphasize agency and an internal locus of control, but until I had a dream that smacked me over the head with "Shadow" imagery, it didn't occur to me that part of my own Shadow would be my own capacity for helplessness, though it sounds pretty obvious once I spell it out. Likewise, someone who led a very rough life might end up putting kindness, or charity, or other "good" feelings/motivations into the Shadow. I've yet to see a book or article on the Shadow that talks about that, and it seems like a real shortcoming.

Anyhow, glad you enjoyed it and found it good food for thought, and thank you for sharing some of those thoughts, as I also obviously found them productive!

Cheers,
Jeff