(This is Part 23 of a series. Go back to Part 22.)
Finally, I'd like to mention one of the greatest gifts that the shadow can bring to us, and that is meaning.
Finding meaning in our life is in some ways our greatest need and our most difficult achievement. And the shadow helps immensely in bringing that about.
First of all, many observers have noted that it is often our greatest wound in life that leads to finding our true path.
I'll start with my own life as the first example. As a child and young adult I was sunk very deeply into depression. I could see no point to life. What was the point to it all? It just seemed a whole lot of needless suffering.
Everywhere I looked, I saw suffering. And in particular, I felt the suffering of my own life. If God existed, why did He/She/It allow all this suffering? And if God consciously allowed it, then perhaps He/She/It was a malevolent God. Or perhaps it simply meant that God didn't care, or didn't exist, or was irrelevant.
This was an unfathomable mystery to me. And so arose the two great questions of my life:
Why does sufffering exist? And what can I do about it?
Every path I've taken in life has, in one way or another, come out of the attempt to respond to those two questions, which in turn arose out of my woundedness, my strong sense of being "damaged goods". Whether or not I have been "successful" in walking that path isn't the point; the point has been the path itself, and its meaning.
Another example: Glenn Cunningham's legs were horribly burned as an eight year-old boy and he was told he would never walk again. In his pain and suffering he resolved to prove his doctors wrong and became the greatest middle-distance runner of his generation.
Dante Alighieri was banished for life from Florence, his cherished hometown, and the woman he was in love with died at 24. These were shattering blows to Dante, yet out of his painful exile he created The Divine Comedy, one of the greatest treasures of the human race.
Many other examples could be given; however, just see for yourself: It's not the only way to find your path, of course, but If you're in confusion about what your real "calling" is in life, try looking carefully at your greatest wound or wounds. They may very well contain the seeds that bring you to your path.
The shadow in life can also bring us to an even greater kind of "meaning", one that involves the discovery that life's "lack of meaning" is the very meaning itself.
As discussed earlier, life's shadow can be very efficient
at promoting a profound feeling of being lost—lost at sea, lost in a dark wood with no light to guide our way. In such a situation our conceptual prison—our usual web
of sacred beliefs, ideologies, "truths" and so forth—can begin to wobble and become more flimsy.
Awareness meditation (the kind that involves looking at one's own mind instead of some fixed object such as a mantra) can also lead us to this result. Indeed, awareness meditation and the shadow often work hand-in-hand, since as awareness meditation deepens we invariably come across various shadow parts of ourselves that have been carefully tucked away and that can shock us with their intensity.
The increasing discovery of these "undesirable" parts can increase our sense of being lost at sea, which in turn can help to further loosen the conceptual prison within which we usually live. We begin to be aware that behind all the thoughts and feelings of the mind is something absolutely empty, like the sky. Talk about being lost!
However, in the increasing perception of that emptiness—it seems empty to the mind because it has no qualities—we may also begin to transcend for the first time the narrow confines of our self-centered existence. We may begin to glimpse that we are not actually the separate being that we thought we were. This is a door, opening onto a vista that is absolutely pristine and undefiled.
Yet this sense of emptiness is not necessarily a pleasant discovery at first. In fact, life can come to seem tasteless and pointless for awhile—there's the shadow again—when one begins to discover that it is actually inherently empty and has no inherent meaning at all.
Yet sooner or later, if we continue plodding through this inner pea soup, the emptiness "flips". It's still absolutely the same, absolutely empty, and yet this nothingness—which we come to understand is who "we" are—is now perceived as absolutely full, rich and inherently joyful. And this remains so even in the midst of life's travails.
Now we perceive that existence itself has no "meaning"
or "purpose"; those are constructs of the human mind. Or to put the same thing in another way, the "meaning" and "purpose" of existence is just to be right here, just being exactly however it is.
Now we make friends with all aspects of reality, knowing that it's all our mirror—hatred brings more hatred, greed brings more greed, kindness brings more kindness. As Aristotle taught, "We become just by the practice of just actions". Now we know that the same is true of our love, our awareness, our compassion for all facets of existence.
Now we value not just the major keys of life but also the minor keys too, knowing that both are necessary to the beautiful melody of the music. Now we value not just the bright colors of the painting but the dark colors as well, knowing that all the colors and hues are necessary to the harmony of the painting that is the One.
Now we value not just the bright, cheerful colors of the day but also the murky blackness of the night. Now we value not just the glorious rays of the sun but also the luminous dark shining of the moon, knowing that both light and darkness are always the eternal light.
—jim sloman, 1.14.06
|
