By Anon
Anonymous comments:
Many people have lots of pain hidden away inside themselves.
Try not thinking about pink elephants for five minutes?
Did it work?
Carl Jung spoke about accepting our dark side.
I used to be concerned that this meant to be equally dark and equally good, but not so.
When we accept our dark side we can forgive ourselves and then we can forgive others for their failings too.
When we accept our dark side we don’t act out on it, we just understand, it and not hate ourselves so much because of it.
Then we find peace, and peace is bliss.
Carl Jung and family
According to Carl Jung: “We all must do what Christ did. We must make our experiment.
“We must make mistakes. We must live out our own version of life.
“And there will be error. If you avoid error you do not live.”
The Psychotherapist & Self Acceptance.
According to the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, there is a ‘dark side’ to all our personalities.
Think of anger, greed, fear and lust.
This ‘dark side’, or ‘shadow’, is usually hidden within our ‘subconscious’.
The ‘dark side’ or ‘shadow’ should not be seen as necessarily always ‘evil’.
For example, there would be no marriages or children without there being a little ‘lust’.
It is extreme or out-of-control lust that is evil.
If we get angry about injustice, that is no bad thing, so long as we remain rational and do not go berserk.
Essential Secrets of Psychotherapy: What is the “Shadow” by Stephen A. Diamond, Ph.D.
Jesus appears to have had his ‘shadow’.
Jesus faced temptations in the desert.
He cursed the fig tree.
The Psychology of Jesus — Chapter 3 — David McKenna
Our rulers want us to be excessively angry, greedy, frightened and lustful.
However, there is also a ‘good side’ to all of us.
Fr. John A. Sanford, in his 1970 book The Kingdom Within, sees Jesus’s instruction “love your enemies” as an attempt to help us deal with all the parts of the whole, the ‘dark side’ and the ‘good side’, without hurting anyone.
Professor Wallace Clift has looked at Jung’s view of humanity as “a story of developing consciousness”.
Clift sees this as being similar to Jesus’s idea of the ‘Holy Spirit’ working to improve us.
Jung called the ‘dark side’ the ‘Shadow’ and he reckoned that it comes from our animal ancestors.
Jung wrote: ‘”The shadow is that hidden, repressed, for the most part inferior and guilt-laden personality whose ultimate ramifications reach back into the realm of our animal ancestors and so comprise the whole historical aspect of the unconscious.”
When the ‘dark side’ emerges, for example in a War I or in a divorce, many people look for scapegoats.
We demonise our enemy.
There is a tendency to blame everything that goes wrong on Moslems or Jews or Blacks or Gays or Gypsies.
Most people deny their ‘shadow’, unconsciously ‘projecting’ it onto others so as to avoid confronting it in oneself.
Essential Secrets of Psychotherapy: What is the “Shadow” by Stephen A. Diamond, Ph.D.
Each of us should accept that we have a ‘dark side’ or ‘shadow’.
The shadow is most dangerous when it is repressed and projected onto others.
When we will not acknowledge our dark side, we are at risk of becoming mentally ill and starting a war.
The ‘saint’ should acknowledge his or her ‘dark side’.
Jekyll was saintly, but he hid and did not acknowledge his other side, Hyde, who was evil.
Jekyll’s personality was split rather than whole.
Essential Secrets of Psychotherapy: What is the “Shadow” by Stephen A. Diamond, Ph.D.
When the CIA and its friends use their Monarch mind-control programme to brainwash children, they create in the children more than one personality.
One personality may the ‘normal’ personality and another may be the ‘assassin’ or sex slave’.
As mentioned above, the ‘shadow’ or ‘dark side’ contains positive some qualities.
Fear can be useful, if it keeps us safe.
Jung believed that most of us have lost touch with certain parts of our selves.
Jung believed that we should not try to be ‘normal’ because that means suppressing our real self, including the ‘shadow’.
The healing of the disturbed person comes when they stop trying to be ‘normal’ and conformist.
We need to accept our ‘shadow’ and see that it involves some normal instincts and creative impulses.
Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion (Springer Verlag, 2009) / Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity (SUNY Press, 1996) / Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature (Tarcher/Putnam, 1991) – all by Stephen A. Diamond,
To be a good Christian you have to be fully aware of the ‘shadow’.
Jesus asked us to consider our own faults, before we look at the faults of others.
Jesus had dinner with tax collectors and sinners.
Jesus had his difficult moments.
“And if anyone will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave the house or town. Truly, I say to you, it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgement for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town…
“But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!…woe to you, blind guides…You blind fools!…You blind men!…You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?”
Jesus was not necessarily kind to pigs or Greeks.
“The moment the evil spirits were cast into the pigs, they rushed headlong from the steep bank onto the lake and were drowned.”
“The woman was a Greek … she begged Jesus to drive the demons out of her daughter. ‘First let the children eat all they want,’ he told her, ‘for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.'”
Rejection of Pascal’s Wager: The Personality of Jesus
Jesus did not claim to be perfect.
Jesus said: “Why do you call me good? No one is good – except God alone.”
Carl Jung Visit Site