Light and Shadow
Where evil comes from
Introduction
Why is evil something that seems to be inseparable from reality? I have never met anyone who has claimed that they are wilfully evil. On the contrary, everybody seems to see themselves as ultimately good and innocent, and when they don’t, it seems to cause tremendous psychological pain. If we are so oriented towards goodness, why does the world seem to be drowning in misfortune, harmful action, and well, evil?
Why is the story of existence a constant struggle against an antagonistic force? What even is this force we all intuitively recognize but find so hard to define? Religious people have an answer at the ready. It is the Devil, the great adversary of the Omnipotent Lord of All Goodness. Yet it leaves another question: Why does the reality of a Perfect God have such a force in it? Why does it seem that the existence of such evil is literally woven into the fabric of reality?
The answer brings us to the second most important dualism after Masculine and Feminine: Light and Shadow.
Experience is born from choice
In the previous part, we discussed how reality is formed in the interaction of the Experiencer and the Experienceable. By their relation, experience is formed. And what we call reality is experience. To stress this point, let’s use the example of language. When you read a book, you extract all kinds of valuable information from it, but this is only possible because you understand the language. If an illiterate person or a foreigner looked into the book, it would be full of meaningless symbols for them. This means that you are an important participant in the process of manifesting experience. Your attention makes the experience possible, and the quality of that experience is very much influenced by your competence and desires.
What we rarely acknowledge, though, is that giving attention to something necessarily means not giving attention to something else. Showing your front to the north means that you show your back to the south. We cannot avoid this, nor should we, for without this possibility for preference, there would be no personality, diversity, or distinction. Choosing necessarily means not choosing something else.
However, when we are not aware of this mechanic and its inevitable consequences, we are liable to fall into the pitfalls it produces. We are in danger of becoming gripped by the Shadow.
Creation of the Shadow
Look at the picture above. It’s an optical illusion called the Rubin vase. You will quickly realize that it can both be a vase and two faces facing each other, but whichever you choose, the other becomes something called negative space. It becomes the background. This is because you chose to put the other into the foreground. You chose to give it the attention, which pushes the other into the Shadow. You made them “non-being”.
But at the same time, the shadow participates in the creation of the entity. The vase is constituted by what isn’t the faces, and the faces are constituted by what isn’t the vase. For at the moment you choose to see the faces as what is, the vase becomes what isn’t, and vice versa.
This means that the moment something is observed or experienced, everything else becomes a background. It becomes That Which Is Not Observed. That which is not in the spotlight of attention, and thus by necessity in the shadow. Not as a flaw of existence, but as a constituent part of reality itself.
The Sun of Attention
Think for a moment about the significance of what the Rubin vase reveals. Your attention is what decides whether the vase is allowed to exist or the faces are. This is because attention is the very light that makes experience possible, and earlier we have already established that what we call reality is experience. That which is denied attention is denied existence. Just like the sun makes life possible by showering everything with light, the Observer makes experience possible by showering everything with attention.
What we give attention to, we energize. What we don’t, we deprive of energy. Attention is like a light, giving power to what it touches. This is both good and bad.
Think about two trees next to a steep hill. One of them has unobstructed access to sunlight all year long, but the other is so close to the hill, that for most of the day it is in the shadow and gets very little light. Inevitably the consequence is that the former tree grows healthy and large, and the latter remains weak and small.
However, it doesn’t stop there. Because the former tree grows larger, it starts to be able to absorb even more sunlight, and grow stronger and larger roots. Eventually it is so big that now it starts to be an additional blockage to the light the little tree used to get, and its roots start to siphon water from the area around the smaller tree as well. This puts the smaller tree into an even worse position than before.
This same example is much more vivid in the life cycles of many predatory animals, such as Golden Eagles. They usually lay two eggs, and after hatching, the stronger chick routinely starts oppressing the weaker one. The difference might not be stark at first, but because of being constantly harassed and denied access to food and warmth by its sibling, the runt becomes weaker every day, while its oppressor grows stronger.
From these two examples, we can see that shadow dynamics have a feedback loop.
Horrible as it may sound, this kind of battle for survival is normal in nature. It is part of the process. In human life, however, something shifts. When we witness these dynamics, we tend to intuitively attribute a moral failing to them. When a mother of two children prefers one of them and showers that one with praise and attention while leaving the other with what they can get, the neglected child becomes emotionally malnourished and thus more difficult—which of course makes the mother all the more averse towards them. This kind of story tends to make us sympathetic to the child and judgemental towards the mother.
Balance of Opposites
Why do we attribute a moral failing to the mother who plays favourites? There is something very important implied here.
If we build up the example a bit more, we can speculate the consequences of such actions. The neglected child will most probably form a myriad of self-esteem issues, which might lead to mental problems, substance abuse or other acting out behaviour. All these will cause ripple effects in the family dynamics, which will cause strife for everybody involved, and of course, for the surrounding society. But it doesn’t stop there. There will most likely be consequences to the favoured child as well. There is a high chance that they will have opposite issues. An inflated sense of self-importance and pride often leads to problems which are just as harmful to everybody else and ultimately to themselves as well. Not to mention that the children will most probably be completely unable to have loving relations with each other if one is preferred and the other is not.
Quite frankly, it isn’t far-fetched to claim that a balanced and fair treatment towards both of them would yield the best results for the children, family, and humanity itself. This is because all problems originate from a failure to appreciate interdependence.
This isn’t as complex as it sounds. Let’s get back to the Rubin vase. If it were merely a picture of a vase, or a picture of two faces, it would be utterly insignificant. But because it contains them both, at equal value, it becomes maybe the most famous optical illusion in the world. By containing them both at the same time, it becomes something much more than either of the two forms. This is the meaning of interdependence, that something is created in the relation between two or more entities.
In a similar sense, a parent who orients toward the whole rather than a part creates something much stronger than what focusing on just one child can produce. That is because a complete whole is always more than just its constituent parts. Just as the Rubin vase is something completely different as a whole than as just its parts, so is a real family more than just its members.
This is because of relationality. We cannot avoid the fact that everything happens in relation to everything else. The meaning of things is defined in relation to their context. Think about a grumpy shopkeeper. He never smiles at anyone, so when he doesn’t smile at you, you think nothing of it. But if he smiled at the other customers, but not at you, that would change everything. Now you have been put in the shadow, because the context of him not smiling at you has changed.
Thus it doesn’t just matter what we do, but what we do in relation to everything else. When we single out or play favourites in a way which disregards the whole, we are creating disturbance in the relational balance of things. What the optimal relational balance actually is, is a more complex question, which I will address in further essays.
Ruined Relations
This disturbance in relations is the key concept in understanding what is being explained here. For there is a difference between the inevitable shadow that every choice creates, and the shadow as the boogeyman it is often portrayed as. When we are aware of the shadow we cast, it doesn’t become a problem. When we look at the Rubin vase, we alternate between seeing the vase and seeing the faces. We are aware of what we are doing, and that’s why we don’t lose track of what we are actually looking at. In a similar sense, a parent showing more attention to a needy child at the expense of others can rectify the situation when they are aware of it. The imbalance doesn’t become a problem to the relations.
What is commonly understood as the shadow occurs when the shadow becomes so alien to us that we refuse to recognize it. This is when the dualization discussed in “Why does nobody understand anything?” occurs. The favoured child becomes the good child, and the neglected child becomes the bad child. Now we have created a protagonist and an antagonist. A Hero and a Villain. Everything good has been projected onto the hero and everything bad onto the villain. Interdependence is seemingly lost, as the relation has turned into a source of strife. The villain is seen as something vile we would rather be completely without. The whole, the family, has been fragmented.
Let’s compare again to the Rubin vase. If someone were able to stop seeing the faces and only see the vase, the whole quality of it would disappear. It would be just an arbitrary picture. Neither the foreground nor the background would really mean anything, for their relation is the whole point. Without this relation, the purpose is lost.
The very same thing happens to the family with ruined relations. The family stops being what it is supposed to be, a complete whole with parts which support each other. When the dynamics turn toxic, the family stops being a beneficial entity and turns into an arbitrary set of relations that often is more trouble than support. Just as the Rubin vase loses its purpose, so does the family.
So we can understand that the problem doesn’t begin with choice itself. It only begins when we fail to respect the “unchosen”. It is okay to put something in the foreground, as long as you still acknowledge the importance of the background. When we forget that, the shadow starts to inflate.
And the dynamic happens at all levels of scale. A glaring example of it is the environmental crisis, which is simply a consequence of humanity putting itself into the foreground, while losing sight of the background it is inseparably linked to: the environment. Now the environment has become the bothersome villain getting in the way of our plans. All simply because we left something utterly important outside the scope of attention and care.
The Debt to Reality
What is forced into the shadow doesn’t disappear as much as we often wish it to. If we disregard physical exercise, we will still feel the effect of lack of exercise. If we disregard sleep, we will feel the effect of lack of rest. If we disregard a family member, we will feel the effect of soured relations.
Every time we force something inappropriately into the shadow, we incur a sort of “debt to reality”. We will pay, one way or another, both for lack of exercise and lack of rest. And just like with debt, there is an interest. The longer we avoid exercise, the harder it becomes to begin. The longer we remain restless, the harder the toll on our body. In a similar vein, the longer we neglect a family member, the more distant the relationship becomes.
The laws of cause and effect are complex and multi-faceted, but roughly speaking, the same pattern always holds. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. For example, action leads to a need for rest, and rest leads to a need for action.
Concerning the family example, attention shown to one child incurs a debt of attention to the other, which will have to be reconciled one way or another. Human relations, of course, include exceptions and complications such as different temperaments, but the same underlying pattern is still there behind it all.
At a larger scale, the same pattern is very prominently visible in the world of politics, which mainly consists of people recognizing and organizing themselves behind a certain archetypal ideal, such as authority and order, or liberty and freedom. This usually leads them to be blind to the value of the oppositional archetypal ideal, and instead to see it as “that which does not belong”. Stereotypically, the authoritarian does not recognize the value of individual freedom, and the libertarian does not recognize the value of centralized order.
But in actuality, both of the ideals are dependent on each other. Complete lack of individual freedom would lead to stagnation and to a lack of innovation and renewal. This eventually dissolves the authoritarian order. Complete lack of centralized order would lead to anarchy and chaos. This eventually leads to the formation of an authoritarian order.
Unification
The underlying motivation for everybody is ultimately a desire to enjoy or, inversely, to be free from suffering. Thus we have an innate aversion towards the tension caused by opposites, which causes us to desire that tension to be resolved. We lack the strength and willingness to accept the inherent feeling of uncertainty that exists when opposing factors are present. This leads us to seek the complete destruction of the “opposing pole”. Secretly desiring that the bothersome child would not exist, or, not so secretly, wishing your political opponents would be destroyed.
But it doesn’t stop there. It also carries into our personal life, where we often loathe having to wake up, but also loathe having to go to bed. Or when we tend towards either doing too little or doing too much. The most humorous example is our tendency to react to criticism by comically overcorrecting to the other side. “Oh? I drive too fast. I’ll show you by driving slower than anyone else on the street!”
This all reflects our frustration and insecurity towards the act of maintaining proper relations. To maintaining proper tension. But the tension is the whole point. As explained in The Sacred Polarity, the whole of reality is constituted in relations. To destroy the tension is to destroy the relation, and that is to destroy the whole. Of course, we cannot ultimately ever fully destroy the relations, but we can make them so bad we start wishing they wouldn’t exist.
And this is the reason for our frustration. Bad relations. With ourselves, with others, with the environment, or ultimately, with God or existence itself. We cause this by an improper and neglectful attitude towards reality, and we remedy the situation by a proper and attentive attitude towards it. When we decide to shoulder the responsibility for proper maintenance of relations, the problems don’t magically disappear, but little by little the suffering and frustration start to ease, because the relation starts to improve.
But if instead we stubbornly refuse and seek the annihilation of that which we have deemed evil, we encounter the ultimate irony. For those who seek to destroy and exploit that which is eternally connected to them become the very evil they seek to destroy.
This dynamic doesn’t only play out between us and others, but also within ourselves. The parts of ourselves we refuse to acknowledge don’t disappear. They become our inner shadow, and that is where we will go next.