(This is Part 1 of a series.)
What is the purpose of the shadow in life?
By "shadow" I'm referring to the suffering and pain in life, and to the events or people or situations that seem
to cause it—which we sometimes refer to as "evil".
What is the purpose of the shadow in life?
When I look inside myself, I find that the purpose is to teach me love, acceptance and compassion. "Shadow" here in a personal context is defined as anything I don't want. If I want to be the new, improved model of myself, then anything that doesn't fit in with that new, "better" model is considered part of my "shadow".
If I decide that I'm addicted to sugar and starch, I want that addiction to go away. "Go away, be gone". And then my new and improved future is beckening in the distance somewhere, a future which will come into being after my "shadow" has gone.
The problem is, I've never seen that process work. That approach to things keeps us always tethered to the future, unhappy with parts of ourselves or parts of our lives right now. But it's always just "right now".
As far as I can tell, the way it actually works is different, a real paradox in fact, because it's the complete opposite of "getting what I want".
Rather, it involves a radical falling in love with the way we are right now, in all our particulars and all of our circumstances and conundrums.
From that radical falling-in-love—which could be called a radical surrender as well—a kind of flowering appears. And that flowering blooms absolutely riotously, until we realize that the breeze of happiness has indeed grazed our cheek with its touch.
All the time we were desiring to get from here to there—so we could be happy—happiness was prevented from coming to us. The very desire to be somewhere else kept it away. I'm not talking about pleasurable moments now, but rather the real or deeper happiness that comes from surrender.
Part of that surrender is in realizing the darnedest thing, that everything is happening by itself. Or to put it another way, that everything is on automatic. It's all just working itself out, this effect leading to that effect leading to this other effect, on and on. Actually, an infinite number of effects leading to the next infinite number of effects, like the next "beat" in a cellular automaton.
But what about our "decisions"? They're just part of the next "beat", the next set of configurations brought about by following the rules of the cellular automaton, whatever they happen to be.
If you could have a large enough computer—of course,
to account for everything that could possibly affect the outcome it would have to be as large as the universe itself—you could predict what “thought” or "decision"
I was going to have in the next second.
In fact, research has shown that the brain prepares to act up to 500 milliseconds before the conscious "decision of our own free will" to take an action. That is, the decision has already happened before we consciously "make the decision". The implication of this is that our "decision" is not voluntary; it's happening on its own.
Then—after involuntary processes have caused the course of action—we humans supply a voice-over saying that "I decided this" or "That was a hard decision I made" and so on. But it all happened by itself.
(This is the end of Part 1. Go to Part 2.)
—jim sloman, 03.18.05
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