As my dear friend Br ent BecV ar
shares, refusing to for give those who have hurt us “is lik e
being a dr owning person whose head is being held under
water by someone else. A t some point you r ealize that you
have to be the one who ﬁghts your way back to the
surface.” The only way to battle heartache and the
oppressive natur e of our shadow is with for giveness and
compassion. F orgiveness doesn’t happen in our heads, but
in our hearts. It unfolds when we e xtract the wisdom and
the gif ts from even our dark est e xperiences and emotions. Forgiveness is the hallway between the past and an
unimaginable futur e.
Stories lik e these demonstrate that we ar e all living in
accor dance with a gr eater plan and that, indeed, everything
happens for a r eason. Nothing occurs by accident, and ther e
are no coincidences. W e are always evolving, whether we
are awar e of it or not. Of tentimes this evolution is painful,
but the pain serves an important purpose. It is a necessary
ingredient in our divine r ecipe. By feeling the ache of
loneliness, our hearts open to r eceive mor e love; by
overcoming the people and situations that have oppr essed
us, we r ealize the depth of our str ength. When we ar e
willing to acknowledge that our pain, traumas, and
heartaches have in fact equipped us with wisdom essential
for our gr owth, we naturally for give and even bless those
who came into our life to teach us those diﬃcult lessons. Our lives ar e divinely designed for each one of us to get
exactly what we need to deliver our own unique e xpression
to the world.Our mind may tell us that bad is bad, good is good, and
that we can never r eally be all that we dr eam of being, but if
our shadow could talk, it would tell us otherwise. It would
tell us that our brightest light can shine only when we’ve
accepted our darkness. It would r eassur e us that ther e is
wisdom in every wound. It would show us that life is a
magical jour ney of making peace with both our humanity
and divinity . Our shadow would tell us that we deserve
better, that we matter, that we ar e mor e than we ever
dreamed possible, and that ther e’s light at the end of the
tunnel. As we embrace our shadow, we ﬁnd out that we ar e living
a divine plan, a plan so important, so vital for our own
evolution as well as for the evolution of humankind. Lik e the
lotus ﬂower that is bor n out of mud, we must honor the
darkest parts of ourselves and the most painful of our life’s
experiences, because they ar e what allow us to birth our
most beautiful self . We need the messy, muddy past, the
muck of our human life—the combination of every hurt,
wound, loss, and unfulﬁlled desir e blended with every joy,
success, and blessing to give us the wisdom, the
perspective, and the drive to step into the most magniﬁcent
expression of ourselves. This is the gif t of the shadow . OceanofPDF .comPART III
OceanofPDF .comOnly Light Can Cast Out Darkness
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON
In a world so ﬁlled with tender magic—fr om sleeping infants
to childr en playing, to lovers smiling, to friendships that last,
to ﬂowers blooming, to the violet hope of sunrise, to the
ﬁery magniﬁcence of sunset, to the brilliance of the body, to
the fragile glories of natur e, to the wonder of animals, to our
capacity to for give, to the mer cy of God, to the kindness of
strangers, and a list that could go on and on until it’s clear
that ther e really is no end to the manifold e xpressions of
love on earth—ther e is, as well, something else. And what is that? Why—in a world wher e we can be moved to tears by a
work of art—does ther e also e xist molestation, rape,
innocents with slit thr oats, unjustly held prisoners, starving
childr en, tortur e, genocide, war, slavery, and all manner of
horriﬁc and unnecessary suﬀering that e xists for no other
reason than that someone is cruel enough to inﬂict it or
someone else doesn’t car e enough to stop it? What for ce
exists, in our minds and in our world, that pr oactively and
seemingly ine xorably moves to cause the suﬀering and
destruction of living things? Why, if God is love, does evil e xist? We live in a world of constant juxtaposition between joy
that’s possible and pain that’s all too common. W e hope for
love and success and abundance, but we never quite for get
that ther e is always lurking the possibility of disaster . We
know ther e is good in the world, but we know that ther e is
something else as well. And we ar e living at a time when acontest between the two is both intense and intensif ying. Whatever it is that leads human beings to hate, to destr oy,
and to kill has tak en on a collective for ce lik e never befor e,
as technology and globalization now give it the capacity to
not just strik e, but to strik e us all, together, as one. Never
has ther e been such an ur gent need to dismantle this for ce,
whatever it is, that is so contemptuous of love and intent on
destr oying us all. This is not just a for ce that seeks to
inconvenience us. It is a for ce that wishes to see us dead. Yet this for ce is in fact an antifor ce. It does not so much do
anything, as it gets us to do its bidding. It is a place wher e
we have for gotten who we ar e, and thus act as we ar e not. It
is a darkness that, lik e all darkness, is not an actual
presence, but is rather the absence of light. It is a black hole
in psychic space that e xists when light is unseen for even a
moment. And the only true light is love. The pr oblem of what to do with this darkness—called by
many names but her e termed the “shadow”—is a question
that has plagued humanity since its earliest beginnings. There has never been, that we know of, a community or
civilization on earth in which love pr evailed at all times. Y et
we continue to dr eam of it. Such a state, accor ding to
certain r eligions of the world, is called paradise. Certain
religious and spiritual te xts suggest we have an ancient
memory of such a state, though this state was not of the
earth at all. It was our spiritual beginnings, a dimension of
pure love whence we come and to which we passionately
long to r eturn. The fact that we live at times, even most of
the time, so separated fr om this state of pur e love is a
psychic ruptur e of such intense pr oportions as to traumatize
us every moment of our lives. Just as the planet moves so
fast that we can’t even feel we’r e moving, we’r e
traumatized at such a deep level that we don’t even know
we’re in trauma. Separated fr om love, we ar e separated fr om God. Separated fr om God, we ar e separated fr om ourselves. Andseparated fr om ourselves, we ar e insane. In the wor ds of Mahatma Gandhi, “The pr oblem with the
world is that humanity is not in its right mind.” That is the
problem with the world, indeed. Ther e is a place we go into,
both individually and collectively, that is the absence of who
and what we ar e and what we ar e her e to do . It is an
inversion of our power, a perversion of our identity, and a
subversion of our mission on earth. The pr oblem is this is not so obvious when we ar e actually
there, for it is a place of gr oss, cosmic confusion. W e are
prone to feel, when we ar e separated fr om love, that our
anger is justiﬁed, our blaming another is only r easonable,
and our attacking someone is in righteous self -defense even
when it is not. Either that, or worse. A t times, a person—
sometimes even whole nations—can become so suck ed into
the black hole of lovelessness as to be at the eﬀect of its
most e xtreme, even heinous intentions, for this thing, which
is actually a no -thing, is not inert. Human consciousness is
like a pilot light that never goes oﬀ. The pr oblem is it is used
to create either a life-pr oducing heat or a life-destr oying
conﬂagration. Wher e ther e is no love, ther e is fear . And fear,
once it has gripped the mind, is lik e a vice that thr eatens to
crush the soul. So that’s what it is, this thing we call the shadow . It does
not appear, in most of our lives, as a gigantic ﬁr e, but
simply as a slow bur n. It is you when you mak e the stupid
remark, hurting someone you love and possibly ruining a
relationship. Or you when you do the stupid thing that
sabotages your car eer. Or you when you pick up the drink,
although you know you’r e an alcoholic and that if you
continue doing this it will kill you. In other wor ds, it is the
you within you that does not wish you well. It is your
shadow, and it can only be eliminated by shining forth your
light. God’s love both dwells within us and e xtends out fr om us
every moment of every day . When we ar e living inalignment with our true selves as God cr eated us, we
receive love constantly and then e xtend it outwar d as we
have r eceived it. That is what it means to live in the light. Yet as commonsensical as this sounds, it does not feel lik e
common sense when someone has behaved in a way that
seems undeserving of our love. A t such a moment,
extending our love to that person feels lik e the wr ong thing
to do, and withholding our love feels right. That moment—
that little bit of unloving thought that seems lik e just a tiny
thing, just a r easonable judgment—is the r oot of all evil. It is
the cor nerstone of the shadow’s thought system, for it
involves a separation fr om God and a casting of blame. God
never withholds love, and we achieve sanity by lear ning to
love as God loves. Our task, if we ar e to cast out the shadow, is to lear n to
think only immortal thoughts, even though we live on the
mortal plane. Our higher thought for ms will lif t the
frequency of the planet, and the world will then transfor m.
But what about now? What mak es us for get who we ar e,
thus tur ning oﬀ the light and splitting the world into two
separate states—love and fear? It is one thought: that
someone is guilty . How we deal with human imperfection is
the essential question that decides whether we dwell in the
shadow or in light. God does not look at a person who has made a mistak e
the same way we do . God does not seek to punish us when
we have made mistak es, but to cor rect us. When we r eturn
to our right minds, loving unconditionally and unwaveringly,
then the world itself will self -correct. That does not mean we lose discer nment, boundaries, or
brain cells. Divine love is not a weakness. God’s love is not a
gooey love. It’s not even always “ nice,” in a kind of pink,
fuzzy way . It involves radical truth telling, the kind of truth
that the heart knows even when the mind r esists it. It has
less to do with style and mor e to do with substance. Ther e
are ways to very sweetly withhold love, putting too muchemphasis on a half -baked understanding of the wor ds
“positive” and “supportive” and ther e are ways to e xtend
love with a kind of harshly r ealistic honesty that only
appears, much later, to have been love at all. It is time for all of us to get deeply serious about love. In
the wor ds of Dr . Martin L uther King, Jr ., it is time to inject
“new meaning into the veins of human civilization.” W e
need to e xpand our sense of love beyond the personal, to its
social and political implications as well. Only in doing so will
we cast out darkness that now hangs lik e a specter above
the world. Living in the darkness, we ar e living in the
shadow . And in the shadow, suﬀering r eigns. IT MIGHT NOT BE REAL, BUT IT SURE L OOKS REAL
Sometimes you have a ﬁght with someone you love and you
can’t even believe it’s happening. It feels lik e a nightmar e.
You actually hear yourself saying, “This can’t be
happening!” And that’s because it isn’t—you ar e lost in a
parallel universe, a hallucination of separation and conﬂict. Years ago, I told myself not to wor ry about the Devil,
because that was all in my mind. And then I r emember what
happened ne xt. I simply stood ther e, stopped in my tracks
by the thought that, in fact, that was the worst place it
could possibly be. I’m not so much comforted by the idea
that ther e’s no Devil out ther e stalking the planet for my
soul, as stagger ed by the idea that ther e is an ever -present
tendency within my own thinking to per ceive without love
and thus mak e myself miserable. So wher e did this “tendency” come fr om? If God is love
and love only, and God is all-powerful, then how did a
counterfor ce ever come into being? The answer, metaphysically, is that actually it did not. Nothing but God’s love e xists, and in the wor ds of A Course
in Miracles,  “What is all-encompassing can have noopposite.” The operative r eason for how an illusory world
that actually does not exist but seems so str ongly to exist
came into being is the principle of fr ee will. We can think whatever we want to think. Our thoughts,
however, have power no matter what we think, because our
creative power comes fr om God. The law of cause and eﬀect
guarantees that we will e xperience the r esult of whatever it
is we choose to think. When we think with love, we ar e
cocreating with God and ther efore cocr eate mor e love. When we think without love, however, we manufactur e fear . What that means is that we have split minds. One part of us
dwells in the light, eter nally at one with God’s love. Y et
another part of us—a part most of ten aligned with the
mortal world—dwells in darkness. And that is the shadow
self. God doesn’t see the shadow because, not being love, it
does not actually e xist. Y et being all-love Himself, He
register ed our suﬀering when we fell into the darkness and
provided for us an instantaneous healing. In that moment,
He cr eated a loving alter native to our self -imposed insanity
and fear . This alter native is lik e a divine ambassador that
dwells with us in the world of darkness, always available to
lead us back to light, should we r equest it. This ambassador
has many names, fr om Thought A djuster to the Holy Spirit. For our purposes her e, we will call it the Illuminator . In A Course in Miracles,  it is said that we ar e not perfect or
that we would not have been bor n—but that it is our mission
to become per fect her e. It is our mission to transcend the
shadow and become our true self . The Illuminator acts as a
bridge between our shadow self and our light. It has been
empower ed by God to use all the for ces of heaven and earth
to lead us out of the darkness back into light. It does so ﬁrst
and for emost by r eminding us that the darkness is not r eal. When we ar e lost in the darkness, our gr eatest power lies in
calling on the Illuminator, whose task is to separate truth
from illusion. W e do this thr ough prayer, and thr oughwillingness. “I’m willing to see this diﬀer ently” is a sentence
that gives the Illuminator per mission to enter into our
thought system and lead us fr om insanity back to truth. A few years ago I went to visit a friend, who alr eady had
several close girlfriends at her home when I ar rived. One
woman in the gr oup had a manner of speaking that seemed
to me very grandiose, so much so that every time she spok e
I felt as if someone wer e running ﬁnger nails acr oss a
blackboar d. Obviously my mind was wild with judgment, as I
could not understand how someone could possibly be so
aﬀected in the way she spok e.
As a seek er on the path, I knew that the pr oblem was not
with the woman, but within myself—my own lack of
compassion. I inwar dly said a prayer and e xpressed my
willingness to see her diﬀer ently. Almost instantly, or so it
seemed to me, one of the other women in the r oom said to
the woman whom I’d been judging so ﬁer cely, “I hear d your
father is being let out of prison. Is that true?”
As I listened, I hear d her story unfold. Although I don’t
remember all the speciﬁcs, I do r emember that this woman
had been held captive by her own father thr oughout much
of her childhood in the basement of their home. She had
eventually been r escued, and her father had gone to jail for
many years. Hearing of this woman’s suﬀering, I r ealized
why she spok e the way she did. She literally had no model
of a healthy adult persona gr owing up; she didn’t even know
how to speak in a natural way and was doing her best to
piece together what she consider ed a nor mal personality . The same mannerisms that had ar oused in me such
judgment ﬁve minutes earlier now ar oused in me deep
admiration and compassion. She had not changed, but I
had. In praying, I had called forth the light. The Illuminator
enter ed into the world of darkness and deliver ed me fr om
my shadow self, my judgmental self, by giving me the piece
of infor mation that would r eplace my thoughts of fear with
thoughts of love.And wher e, in this lifetime, had I gotten my tendency to
judge so harshly to begin with? F rom a metaphysical
perspective, I was not bor n with it. W e are not bor n in
original sin, or er ror, but in fundamental and primal
innocence. I seem to have a very powerful birth memory . I can’t know
of course whether it’s actually true, but I’ve had it for as
long as I can r emember . I even r emember seeing the light
ﬁxtur e that hangs over operating tables, which adds to my
feeling that this might be true. A ccording to the memory, I
came into this world with an inﬁnite amount of love to give,
beyond anything I’ve allowed myself to feel since. But this was in 1952, when doctors still thought they wer e
supposed to slap newbor n babies to get them to br eathe. So
just as I felt this e xtraor dinary love beaming out of me to all
living things, in the very ne xt moment I felt myself slapped. The doctor, whom I alr eady loved, had hit me. I r emember
being absolutely and totally confused, hurt, and
traumatized. Why would he do that? I just could not believe
that this had happened. And then my mind went blank. I
descended into whatever I descended into, and that was
that. That memory, or whatever it is, speaks to the question of
whether we ar e bor n with the shadow . The answer is no, we
are bor n in perfect love. But whoever we ar e and whatever
we have been thr ough, something or someone—of ten with
the best of intentions—casts us into the r ealm of shadow,
and the task of the r est of our lives will be to e xit the
darkness and r eturn to light. From that one moment as a newbor n—that one traumatic
split fr om love that r eenacted within me the separation of all
humanity fr om the love at our cor e—I would be for ever
tempted to lose sight of love. Having been denied love,
even for a moment, I am now tempted to deny love to
others. And the purpose of my life, as it is the purpose of allour lives, is to r emember the love within me by
remembering its pr esence in everyone else. The woman at my friend’s house, admirable though she
was, tempted me at ﬁrst to judgment. But I ask ed for help,
and I was given it. As soon as I was willing to see the light in
her, my own light r eturned. And the shadow was gone. WHERE THERE’S NO L OVE, EXPECT FEAR
Any thought not ﬁlled with love is an invitation for the
shadow to enter . We are led to believe in the myth of
neutrality : that we don’t r eally need to love as long as we
don’t actively do har m. But every thought either heals or
harms. The inﬁnitely cr eative power of thought guarantees
that whatever we choose to think will r esult in an eﬀect. If I
do not choose to love—if I choose to withhold my love at all
—then in that moment ther e is cr eated a psychic void. And
fear will rush in to ﬁll the space. This applies to my thoughts about others and to my
thoughts about myself . Having focused on aspects of
someone else’s shadow, I cannot but enter my own: the
angry one, the contr olling one, the needy one, the dishonest
one, the manipulative one, and so forth. Once I enter the
darkness of blame and judgment, I’m blinded to my own
light and cannot ﬁnd my better self . Or having for gotten the essential truth of my own being—
not appr eciating myself by appr eciating the divine light that
dwells within me—I fall easily into the trap of self -
destructive behavior . I engage in whatever for m of self -
sabotage will mak e others for get, as I have for gotten, who I
really am. Whether we ar e attacking others or attacking
ourselves, the shadow pr ovides the temptation to thoughts
of destruction and insanity . The mind in its natural state is in constant communion
with the spirit of love. But the shadow, lik e love, has itsambassadors within us—thoughts that lur e us constantly to
perceive in a loveless way . “He said he would hir e me and
he didn’t; he is such a bastar d.” “Her politics disgust me; I
can’t stand her .” “Eat the whole cak e; it doesn’t matter
what the doctor said.” “It doesn’t matter if you k eep that
money; they will never know .” The world is dominated by
thoughts of fear, and we ar e constantly fortiﬁed in our
shadow beliefs. In the absence of prayer or meditation—an e xperience of
shared love between Cr eator and the cr eated—we ar e easily
tempted to per ceive without love, thus entering the shadow
zone within ourselves. Whether we ar e projecting guilt onto
others, actually har ming another, or engaging in addictive
or self -hating behavior that hurts primarily ourselves, the
shadow e xerts an ugly inﬂuence. Yet why should we be surprised? Most of us wak e up in the
morning and, in eﬀect, sur render our minds to darkness. The ﬁrst thing we do is tur n on the computer, r ead the
newspaper, or tur n on radio or television news. W e
download thought for ms of fear fr om literally all over the
world, allowing our minds, at a time when they ar e most
open to new impr essions, to be inﬂuenced by the fear -based
thinking that dominates our cultur e. Of course  we r espond
from shadow, for all we’ve look ed at is shadow! Of course
we feel depr essed, unhappy, out of sorts, and cynical. The
world is dominated by fear -based thinking, and on the
mortal plane fear speaks ﬁrst and fear speaks loudest. There’s no darkness to analyze her e, so much as light we
need to tur n on! In or der to avoid the clutches of the
shadow, we must constantly r each for the light. The voice of love is called in both Judaism and Christianity
the “still, small voice” for God. That is the voice of the
Illuminator, and even ﬁve minutes of serious meditation in
the mor ning can guarantee that it will guide our thinking
throughout the day . How much better this world would be if
more of us would cultivate the sacr ed in our daily lives. Ourbusyness is of ten our enemy, making it har d for us to slow
down long enough to br eathe in the ethers of the spiritual
planes. Just as we sometimes sit in fr ont of our computers
while a ﬁle is downloading, knowing ther e’s nothing we can
do to rush the pr ocess, so ther e is no way to simply give a
quick nod to love as we rush out the door in the mor ning
and e xpect the r ealms of darkness and fear to not invade
our day . In slowing down, we’r e mor e likely to cultivate quiet. Our
moder n lifestyle is too of ten pr ey to shadow thoughts for no
other r eason than that it’s too noisy . Too much television,
too much computer, too much outer stimulation diminishes
the light that is found only in r eﬂective and contemplative
thought. Silence is an attitudinal muscle we build up, giving
us the capacity to mor e easily transfor m the ener gies
conjur ed up by the shadow self . Another way to cultivate light is to commune with others
in a holy space. In spiritual gr oups joined in love and
devotion—r eligious or otherwise—a ﬁeld of love is magniﬁed
so that it lif ts all members in the gr oup up to a higher
vibration. When you ar e at chur ch, synagogue, twelve-step
meetings, or other gr oup meditations, listening to your
heart seems natural. Y our shadow self seems far away,
neither evident nor trigger ed. The temptation to enter your
shadow still e xists and needs to be dealt with, but one of
the ways the shadow is diminished is by joining with others
in the sear ch for light. When we’r e with other people who ar e saying, “I want to
listen to my heart, I need to ask what the most loving thing
would be, I want to be ethical, I want to hear God’s voice,”
then it becomes easier to live that way . Like any habit, it
becomes easier to cultivate when we’r e around others doing
the same. In developing the habits of spiritual practice, you
ground yourself in the light of your true being. If you do not
so gr ound yourself, do not be surprised when you say or do
things that you later r egret.On an average day in the life of an average person, the
number of shadow thoughts that come up is astr onomical. We do our best, we try to be good, but our brain is
constantly active, and the tendency towar d fear -based
thought is always ther e. But the Illuminator is ther e as well. And the Illuminator is authorized by God to give us whatever
help we need. Talking to my therapist one day, I was sharing with him
that I felt in a very negative place. I told him I was in a place
of self -loathing. He ask ed me, “What is your case against yourself?”
I said, “I hate myself because I’m so negative.” I could see
the ir ony, but I couldn’t laugh. Or maybe I did. He suggested that I try something. “ Be in the ﬂow of
gratitude,” he said. “Whenever you ar e having that kind of
negative thought, go into naming all the things you have to
be grateful for .”
And I found that technique to be very powerful. F or hours,
I’d been on a rampage of negativity, but as soon as I began
the ﬂow of gratitude, it was as though my shadow
disappear ed the way the W icked W itch melted when
Dorothy thr ew water on her . And it was the same
phenomenon, r eally. The shadow isn’t even r eal. It just
appears so . And as soon as it’s e xposed to light, then the
darkness disappears. The pr oblem, then, was not just the
presence of my negativity, but the absence of my positivity! As soon as I ﬁlled my mind with gratitude, the shadow trait
of self -hatr ed could no longer e xist. In the pr esence of love,
fear is gone. But let us not under estimate the power of the shadow . It’s
not enough to just meditate sometimes; we should mediate
daily. It’s not enough, if you’r e a recovering addict, to attend
a meeting every once in a while; you should attend a
meeting every day . It’s not enough that we for give a few
people; we must try our best to for give every one, for only
love is r eal. If I withhold it fr om anyone, then I withhold itfrom myself . And it’s not enough to love only when it’s easy;
we must try to e xpand our capacity to love even when it’s
hard. The shadows that ar e lurking today, in our own
circumstances and ar ound our planet, demand nothing short
of sacr ed illumination if we ar e to cast them out. And each
of us can add to the light by adding to our love. Of course
we love our childr en, but it’s no longer enough to just love
our own childr en. W e must lear n to love the childr en on the
other side of town and the other side of the world. It’s easy
enough to love those who agr ee with us and tr eat us well. We must lear n to love those with whom we do not agr ee and
who have not necessarily tr eated us justly . Just as we work
to build up our muscles, we must work to e xpand our
capacity to love. There is only one thing that can triumph over our lower
self, our shadow self, and that is our higher self . And the
higher self dwells within the highest love of all: the love of
our Cr eator, in whom ther e is no darkness, no suﬀering or
fear. It is psychologically unr ealistic to under estimate the
power of the shadow, but it is spiritually immatur e to
under estimate the power of God. P rayer is not just a
symbol; it is a force. Meditation is not just something that
relaxes us; it is something that har monizes the ener gies of
the universe. F orgiveness doesn’t just mak e us feel better; it
literally transfor ms the heart. All the powers that emanate
from God ar e powers that will set us fr ee. To the shadow, the light is an enemy . But to the light, the
shadow is nothing. It simply does not e xist. BY THE W AY, IT’S ON THE MO VE
Consciousness is a dynamic, cr eative ener gy. It is not inert,
it is not stagnant. It is always e xpanding in whatever
direction it’s moving. Love will always build on love, andfear will always build on fear . The shadow is an ine xorable
drive towar d suﬀering and pain. Yet how does this thing—which itself is an illusion, which
itself has no life—act as though it does? The answer to that
is that although fear itself is not r eal, the power of thought
that car ries it is. Fear is lik e an e xplosive device, and
thought is the missile on which it rides. The mind is cr eated
to be a conduit of the divine, delivering e xplosions of love,
but fr ee will means we can dir ect it otherwise, should we
choose. Your mind is always either e xtending love or pr ojecting
fear as well as subconsciously planning how to do mor e of
the same. The shadow is your own mind tur ned against
yourself . Just as L ucifer was the most beautiful angel in
heaven befor e he fell and a cancer cell was a nor mal
working cell befor e it went haywir e, the shadow is your own
thinking tur ned in the wr ong dir ection. It is your self -hatr ed
masquerading as self -love. Y our shadow is as intelligent as
you ar e, because it is your own intelligence co -opted for
fear’s purposes. It has all the attributes of life, because it
has attached itself to your life. And lik e all life, it seeks to
preserve itself . Whenever love is near, the shadow becomes particularly
active in or der to guar d against its own demise. It knows
that love is its only r eal enemy . When the shadow senses
love, when it senses the light in you, it literally runs for its
life. The shadow will try, in whatever way possible, to
invalidate, suppr ess, mak e wrong the good in you—for it
knows that once you r emember the light of your true self,
it’s gone. And so it ﬁghts. Thus the well-known phrase, “ Love brings up everything
unlike itself .” You met someone with whom your soul feels is
a sacr ed connection? Bewar e, you’r e likely to do something
stupid in that person’s pr esence. Y ou have an e xtraor dinary
chance to manifest your dr eams? Bewar e, you’r e likely tosabotage the opportunity . And that is the shadow : the evil
twin of your better self . Until ther e is a conscious movement away fr om fear
towar d love, the dynamic ener gy of fear will be acting as a
destructive for ce that tak es no prisoners. It can lead to
something as seemingly small as an incident in which you
say something stupid but har mless or as consequential as
an action that could actually ruin your life. W e should
neither under estimate its power nor doubt its viciousness,
for the shadow is on a rampage—sometimes in a slow and
long drawn- out fashion and sometimes mor e quickly—but it
is always intentional in the dir ection of pain. In Alcoholics Anonymous, it is said that alcoholism is a
“progressive disease.” What this means is that it will not
stay put; if you’ve got a pr oblem with alcohol today, then
you’ll have even a bigger pr oblem with it tomor row unless
you deal with it. And its ultimate goal is destruction, even to
the point of death. An addiction such as alcoholism isn’t just
about alcohol; it’s about the movement of dark ener gy, a
shadow for ce that plagues both body and soul. And the
reason so many millions of addicts have gotten sober
through A A is that the pr ogram mak es it clear that only a
spiritual e xperience can save them. Only God is powerful
enough to over come the shadow, whatever its for m.
When Jesus said, in the Bible, that we should be of good
cheer for he had “ overcome” the world, the wor d he chose
there is particularly fascinating. He didn’t say that he had
“ﬁxed” the world. He said that he had “ overcome” dark
forces, by being lif ted to the r ealm of consciousness wher e
lower thought for ms no longer had power to limit him. And
that is the shadow’s challenge to us: that we r each so high
for the light above—the deep sanity of a higher and mor e
loving perspective—that the shadow itself is r ender ed
powerless.GROUP SHADOWS
We all r ecognize the shadow when it tak es individual for m: a
person who is angry, contr olling, dishonest, violent, and so
forth. But sometimes it’s just as important to r ecognize the
collective shadow of a gr oup. Gr oups such as nations ar e
made up of individuals; ther efore it’s not surprising that the
personality characteristics of its members show up in the
collective behavior of the gr oup. But what is less obvious is
how ener gy cr eated in a gr oup—whether loving or fearful—
is magniﬁed; the ener gy of two or mor e minds thinking in
the same way is not just the sum of those two . It incr eases
exponentially . Terrorism is an e xample. A pathological ideology can
spread lik e a cancer thr oughout an entir e population. Once
large enough numbers of people ar e enr olled in the
destructive thought for ms that mak e up the ideology, the
force of their combined ener gy can be truly confounding to
even the most technologically advanced purveyors of brute
force. The r eason this is true is that the actual power of the
terrorist thr eat lies not in its ideological r oots, but in the
passionate conviction with which so many people ar e drawn
into it. T errorists have conviction,  and ther ein lies their
power . Our power to over ride their destructive intensity lies
in our ability to love with as much conviction as they show
in hate. Hating with conviction, they draw forth mor e hatr ed;
when we love with gr eater conviction, we will draw forth
more love. Just as no person is perfect, so neither is any gr oup. The
shadow hides itself fr om the conscious awar eness of both
individual and collective, posing always as the light,
although it is the essence of darkness. A quote fr om R alph
Waldo Emerson describes the shadow of nationalism when
posing as patriotism: “When a whole nation is r oaring
Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to e xplor e the
cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.” It is of tenwhen a gr oup is violating its principles the most that it
claims to be standing up for them the most enthusiastically . The shadow is sly in the way it covers its tracks, whether
using r eligion as a cover for bur ning people at the stak e or
using patriotism as a cover for imperialistic misadventur es. But just as the collective shadow can bring us down, the
collective light can bring us up. Any gr eat literatur e; popular
expressions such as fairy tales, ﬁlms lik e Avatar,  and books
like the Harry Potter  series; and obviously, genuine r eligious
or spiritual gr oup practice—all ar e examples of collective
beams of light. In the movie Avatar,  the collective shadow of
contemporary America is on full display . We see the
danger ous mar riage of pr edatory capitalism to the full might
of American militarism, an intellectual haughtiness that
disallows defer ence to spiritual principles, an ar rogant
disregard for the sacr edness of the envir onment, and an
imperialistic tendency to tak e whatever it wants for no other
reason than that it wants to . The ugliness of America’s
shadow gets a full- on spotlight in this passion play of a ﬁlm. Yet what lif ts the story beyond mer e ﬁnger -pointing to the
level of illumination is its perspicacity r egarding the light
that is never too far fr om the shadow . The Illuminator is always poised to pr ovide an alter native
to darkness, drawing loving hearts to the scene of the
shadow the way r ed blood cells ar e drawn to a wound. Y es,
there are characters in the ﬁlm who r epresent our worst, but
there are also characters who r epresent our best, and that is
important. W ithin every individual as well as every gr oup,
the better angels of our natur e do e xist. Lik e darkness, they
are on the move (notice that angels ar e always pictur ed
with wings, while the Devil is not). And in the lar ger scope of
things, the light always wins out in the end. In the wor ds of
Martin L uther King, Jr ., “The moral ar c of the universe is
long, but it bends towar d justice.” W e can for get the truth,
but the universe never does.Every person and every gr oup of people has a shadow;
that does not mak e us bad. It mak es us human. The point is
not to hate the shadow, for it is simply our wounded places
that need to be healed. But the point is not to deny the
shadow either, for darkness is only dispersed when it is
brought to light. W e must face the shadow, as individuals
and as gr oups; to do so is not an act of self -hate, but of self -
love. T rue pilgrims ar e those who face their darkness and
surrender it to the power of love; true patriots ar e those who
face the darkness of their nation and sur render it to the
power of truth. Even when we ar e lost in our shadow, ther e is a part of us
that knows better . Even in a gr oup that displays wr ong-
minded behavior, ther e are always individuals who hold out
for truth—whether Aryan Ger mans who hid Jews during
World W ar II at the risk of their own lives or the earthlings
who her oically came to the defense of the Na’vi citizenry of
Pandora in Avatar . Ther e is historical evidence as well as
mythical lor e that r eveal the ultimate triumph of love. The
signiﬁcance of W orld W ar II lies not only in the evil of Hitler,
but in the brilliance and sacriﬁce of those who defeated him. The ar chetypal truth of Avatar  lies not only in the violence
that was done to the Na’vi, but also in how the violence
ended. The ultimate point of gr eat religious stories is not the
cruciﬁxion but the r esurrection, not the slavery of the
Israelites but their deliverance to the P romised Land. Now,
in our day and age, with so many shadows thr eatening, it
behooves us to r emember that shadows appear very dark,
but ar e as nothing befor e true light. This truth can be very har d to accept, when all rational
evidence points not only to the r eality of the shadow, but
also to its per manence. The miracle of illumination,
however, does not come fr om rational evidence; it comes
literally fr om “out of the blue,” a consummate visual symbol
for the r ealms of pur e potentiality . The potential for inﬁnitebreakthr ough emer ges when our pr oactive embrace of the
light is even gr eater than our fear of the dark. We cannot per ceive that light with the body’s eyes. It is a
reality that calls for a diﬀer ent kind of seeing. Mortal
manifestation is “ real,” but only immortal love is “ Real.” In
the wor ds of Albert Einstein when speaking of the physical
world, “ Reality is mer ely an illusion, albeit a very persistent
one.”
If we identif y only with the mortal world, then fear does
indeed seem justiﬁed. But if we e xtend our per ceptions
beyond this world, then we see things in a higher and mor e
hopeful light. W e see that it’s pr ogrammed into the true
natur e of things that love will always r eassert itself . Although we ar e doomed to fall into the shadow—to
descend into the psychic underworld of our own unhealed
places—we ar e also guaranteed deliverance. The Illuminator
is an eter nal pr esence, active not only within the individual
heart, but also within the collective psyche. When
individuals humble themselves, asking for for giveness and
correction, then mer cy ar rives. And the same is true for a
group. When Ger man chancellor Ger hard Schr oeder
apologized to the P olish people for the mur der of half a
million P oles during W orld W ar II, and when P ope John P aul II
apologized for the Inquisition, such “puriﬁcation of
memory,” as these admissions wer e described by the late
pope, called down a light fr om the consciousness of heaven
and shadows wer e dispersed. Individuals ar e on a path of destiny, and so ar e groups. Sometimes, we tak e two steps forwar d into love and then
one step back into the shadow . But the lur e of the light is in
the ﬁnal analysis much gr eater than the lur e of the dark. GOOD INTENTIONS ARE NOT ENOUGHThe moder n mind has undeservedly high self -esteem; it is
arrogant in its belief that it can simply “decide” what it
wants and then mak e it happen. Y et think of the things that
fall away fr om its grasp: the end to unnecessary suﬀering,
world peace, a healthy planet. Why, in a world so full of
genius, does the shadow still lurk and cause the pr oblems it
does? One of the r easons the moder n world r emains at the eﬀect
of the shadow is that it fails to r ecognize the shadow’s
metaphysical r oots. Evil is an ener gy, just as love is an
energy. It arises fr om fear, and fear arises fr om
lovelessness. T rying to eradicate darkness only by material
means is to deal with it on the level of eﬀect, but not cause. You can cut oﬀ a wart, but it will gr ow back unless its r oots
are bur ned out. And the r oots of evil ar e not material. But ther e is a diﬀer ence between nonmaterial ener gy that
is simply mental and the kind that is spiritual. Many people
today have an inﬂated view of the power of “intention.” But
in fact, as it says in A Course in Miracles,  your good
intentions ar e not enough. F or alcoholics, mer ely intending
to no longer drink will not quite do the trick; mer ely
intending  to be a better spouse is not quite enough, if an
actual change in behavior is necessary . Yet sometimes the
change of behavior that is called for in life is not so easy to
achieve. Mer e intention to do better can be over ridden by
the power of the shadow . The shadow can over ride our best
intentions, and only love can over ride the shadow . Love is God, and God is love. Whether people call on God
using the name “ God” or simply give up all r esistance to
love—in which case God is pr esent, even if unacknowledged
—the divine power of love is the only power gr eat enough to
cast out evil. Whether it’s the wisdom to know that feeding
more of the starving childr en of the world is one of the best
ways to eliminate futur e terrorist thr eats, or sur rendering
our character defects to God for healing and asking that
they be r emoved, ther e is a defer ence to the higher powerof love without which we cannot over come the power of
fear. The shadow’s lair is not in your conscious mind, but in
your subconscious mind. Y ou don’t consciously  decide to do
the stupid thing. Y ou don’t consciously  decide to say
something that would mak e your spouse hate you. Y ou don’t
consciously  decide to get drunk at your daughter’s wedding
and ruin everything. “The Devil made me do it” is not as
unsophisticated a notion as it sounds. Good intentions mak e
the Devil laugh. But what don’t mak e him laugh ar e prayer,
atonement, for giveness, and love. Those things mak e him
leave. Which brings up the question of r eligion. Why, if r eligion is
a conduit for divine love, does so much evil still lurk in the
world and even within its own ranks? How does one of the
largest r eligious institutions in the world come to harbor
pedophiles in its priesthood? And the answer of course is
that some r eligion has nothing at all to do with God. In fact,
if anything, the shadow—the ener getic counterfor ce to God
—loves to play in the ﬁelds of r eligion. It loves to confuse,
and it’s deﬁnitely confusing to the mind when doctrine or
dogma based on love is actually a cover for the gr ossest
lovelessness. If a religious person hates, God is not pr esent. If an atheist
loves, then ther e He is. As it says in A Course in Miracles,
the line in the Bible that “ God shall not be mock ed” means
that He isn’t. When seeking r eligious discer nment, however, it’s
important to not thr ow out the baby with the bathwater . The
Latin r oot of the wor d “religion ” is religio,  which means to
“bind back.” R eal religion—whether it occurs within the
conte xt of an or ganized institution or a mor e universal
spirituality—r econnects us to the truth of who we ar e, to the
love at our cor e, and to the compassion that heals. The only
way to over come the shadow is to become our true self, and
whatever it is that tak es us to that place is in its essence areligious e xperience. F or some people, that is an e xperience
at chur ch, synagogue, mosque, or shrine; for some, it is the
experience of a spiritual or psychotherapeutic practice; for
some, it is the e xperience of natur e; for some, it is the
experience of holding their child in their ar ms for the ﬁrst
time. The point is not what gets us to the e xperience, but
rather what happens to us and within us once we ar e ther e.
Something changes in us once we have r eturned to the cor e
of our being, if even just for a moment. It gives us a taste of
what’s possible, within us and ar ound us. It lif ts the veil that
shrouds the r eality of love, and the e xtent of our true power . Once we’r e realigned with our essential natur e, we’ll have
the power to mak e shadows disappear . According to A Course in Miracles,  “miracles occur
naturally as e xpressions of love.” Whenever our hearts ar e
open, the darkness is r eplaced by light. In the meantime—
whether it’s in a type of medicine that doesn’t include a
holistic perspective, a r eligion that doesn’t include love, a
therapy that doesn’t include a higher power, or a
relationship that doesn’t include a sacr ed dimension—the
shadow will hover ar ound the door until some moment of
fear. Then at that point it will steal thr ough the darkness and
put a stak e through the heart of someone’s dr eams. OWNING AND A TONING
No matter how much we understand about the shadow, the
point is to get rid of it. But to do this, we must own it ﬁrst. The solution to the pr oblem of the shadow, in both Jewish
and Christian thought, is the principle of atonement. It is the
idea that once we have acknowledged our sins and
surrender ed them to God with true r emorse, we ar e
released fr om their spiritual consequences. (“Sin ” derives
from an ar chery ter m meaning you’ve missed the mark; the
spiritual meaning of the wor d “sin ” is “er ror.”)Buddha described the law of karma, which basically
means cause and eﬀect—action, r eaction, action, r eaction. The principle of atonement means that in a moment of
grace, bad k arma is bur ned. A tonement is a kind of cosmic
reset button, by which mortal shadow thoughts ar e undone
and r eplaced by the perfection of love. In the Catholic r eligion, the practice of confession is an
ongoing e xperience of atonement, as penitents confess
their sins and ask God for for giveness. In the Jewish r eligion,
the Day of A tonement, or Y om Kippur, is the holiest day of
the year . On that day, Jews admit and ask for giveness for all
sins committed during the year leading up to that day; they
ask God for the chance to be inscribed for another year in
the Book of Life. In Alcoholics Anonymous, addicts ar e
advised to tak e a fearless moral inventory, admitting their
character defects and asking God to r emove them. All of
these ar e examples of the spiritual pr ocess by which the
shadow, when br ought to the light, is then transfor med
through the power of atonement. Atonement e xists because it is necessary . We are all
human, we ar e all wounded, and we all fall pr ey to the
shadow side of human e xistence. W e have all fallen, yes,
but we ar e not without the means to rise back up. In or der
to do so, however, we must commit to the power that
rebuilds our wings. W e must be willing to bring our darkness
to light and to consciously and willingly sur render it to God. Let’s say I have come to r ealize that a diﬃcult situation in
my life was caused by my own er ror or personality defect. Perhaps I was contr olling in a r elationship and so cr eated
conﬂict with a friend or family member . Atonement calls for
me to r ecognize my shadow aspect—in this instance, my
contr olling natur e—and ask God to r emove it. As we’ve discussed befor e, it’s not enough to just say,
“Okay, I won’t be contr olling anymor e.” That is certainly a
good r esolution and may go a long way towar d cor recting
behavior . But when a trait is an actual patter n within yourpersonality—a shadow face you wear that is truly you at
your worst or near worst—then it has become entr enched
within your attitudinal matrix. It is not enough to just decide
to be diﬀer ent, because the shadow has over ridden your
normal decision-making powers. Once a shadow persona
has developed—you the cynical, you the jealous, you the
raging—then healing r equir es that you atone: that you tak e
responsibility for the damage you might have alr eady done
and ask God to change your heart. It is critically important that we look deeply at our own
thoughts and actions—particularly wher e they have been
mistak en. In doing so we ar e addr essing not only our
individual shadow, but the collective shadow as well. Ultimately, the healing of the world will emer ge not fr om our
changing and cor recting others, but fr om our willingness to
change and cor rect ourselves. Since all minds ar e joined,
our ability to self -correct has a cor rective inﬂuence on the
entire universe. In a very r eal way, it’s the only thing that
does. This cor rection might begin with a nudge fr om conscience. Conscience is healthy shame—a temporary discomfort that
comes not fr om the shadow, but fr om the light. It is only a
sociopath, af ter all, who feels no r emorse. It is part of what
makes us human, that something in us knows when we
have been wr ong. The pr ocess of atonement involves courage, compassion,
and honesty with oneself : “I bring this up. I r ealize it is my
wound. I’m willing to look at it, and I’m willing to change.” It
is so easy, when a situation is diﬃcult, to cast all blame for
the pr oblem onto others. But the true seek er says, “What
did I do wr ong? What was my part in this disaster?”
If we don’t look at wher e we’r e dishonest, harsh,
unfor giving, disr espectful, gr eedy, domineering, and so on,
then we cannot change that thing. If we just suppr ess our
shadow, trying to disown it, then it e xists as an unintegrated
fractal of our personality . And we have no power over whatwe have not e xplor ed. Whatever it is, it will act lik e an
emotional ter rorist embedded within our psyche, able to
ambush us at any time. It will mak e itself known in one
situation or another as a psychic scr eam we cannot ignor e.
This is natur e’s brilliant way of for cing us to look at
something, for nothing gets our attention lik e going thr ough
a personal disaster and knowing that we caused it. The shadow acts lik e a series of land mines in your
personality . You think you’r e doing so well—you’ve got your
list together, your organization together, your business plan
together, your money together—you think you’ve got
everything so together, and then you go do something that
totally blows everything. Y ou can har dly believe it. Nobody
else blew it— you blew it. And you ﬁnally r ealize that until
you deal with that part of your personality, you’ll pr obably
blow it again. I asked a woman once, “ Are you in a r elationship now?”
And she said, “I hate who I am when I’m in a r elationship. I’d
rather not be in one.” So many people can r elate. W e say to
ourselves, “I don’t even want to go out ther e. I don’t want to
attract a r elationship or a business opportunity or whatever,
until I have healed whatever part of myself that is sur e to
sabotage it when and if it happens.”
It tak es courage to deeply look at ourselves, but we can’t
have r eal fr eedom and peace until we do . That’s why we
want to be car eful not to over emphasize a quick and easy
trip to happiness. Enlightenment gets us to joy, but not
immediately . First we must face the sor row that stands in
front of it. We must tak e the time to r eﬂect on our own dysfunction,
our shadows, because unless we look at them, they r emain
in place. But this can be har d. We heal thr ough a kind of
detox process, and sometimes we have to bur n through
diﬃcult feelings as they come up for r eview . Something
emer ges fr om the shadow of our subconscious mind, giving
us the chance to see it clearly, and we ar e hor riﬁed to thinkwe wer e ever lik e that. But we ar e not lef t at that place
without the Illuminator’s help. If we so choose, we can
surrender our darkness and ask that it be healed. God will
not tak e from us what we do not consciously r elease to Him,
for to do so would be a violation of our fr ee will. But what we
do sur render and atone for is then transfor med. Such inner work can be painful, but it is vital and
unavoidable. Emotional pain is important, just as physical
pain is. If you had br oken a leg and it wasn’t painful, how
would you know it needed to be reset? Physical pain is a
way the body says, “ Look at this. Car e for this. T end to this.”
And psychic pain is the same. Sometimes we need to say, “I
need to tend to this pain. Why is it her e? What is this
situation trying to tell me? What part of myself do I need to
address?” If you go to the doctor with a tor n knee, the
doctor doesn’t say, “W ell, let’s look at that elbow .” It is the
same with God. The wound must be look ed at. And the
physician, both human and divine, is not ther e to judge you,
but to heal you. We’re often afraid of taking a good look at our shadow,
because we want to avoid the shame or embar rassment
that might come along with admitting our mistak es. W e feel
if we tak e a deep look at ourselves, we’ll be too e xposed. We don’t want to look at our own shadow, because we’r e
afraid of what we might see. But the only thing we should
actually fear is not looking at it, for our denial of the shadow
is exactly what fuels it. At ﬁrst you say, “I don’t want to look at it, because I’ll
hate myself .” But then you say, “No, I have to look at it,
because otherwise I can’t r elease it to God.” And something
counterintuitive and wonderful happens when you do . One
day I look ed at something in myself that I had been avoiding
because it was too painful. Y et once I did tak e a look, I had
an une xpected surprise. R ather than feeling self -hatr ed, I
was ﬂooded with compassion for myself, because I r ealizedhow much pain I would have had to be in to develop that
sort of coping mechanism to begin with. All of us ar e scar red, yet the pr oblem is that our scars
don’t show up as such in the eyes of other people. R ather,
they show up as character defects. If a thr ee-year-old is
screaming and crying, we’r e likely to say, “ Oh, the poor
darling is so tir ed.” But when you’r e a crying and scr eaming
forty-year-old—even if your pain is dir ectly r elated to your
trauma as a thr ee-year-old—people don’t say, “ Oh, he’s so
tired.” They say, “ He’s hor rible.”
Your character defects ar e not wher e you’r e bad, but
wher e you’r e wounded. But no matter who or what caused
the wound, it’s yours now and you’r e responsible for it. The
only person who can bring it up and r elease it is you. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter wher e you got your character
defects anyway . They’r e yours now . You can’t live with a sign
around your neck saying, “It’s not my fault. My par ents wer e
diﬃcult.” Y our only way out of your conundrum is to tak e
total r esponsibility for those defects. Your character defects ar e the way you self -sabotage, the
way you hurt yourself and others. That’s why you have to
look at them. Until you tak e complete r esponsibility for your
own e xperience, you can’t change it. But once you’ve truly
looked at yourself, you can start healing. Y ou’ve opened
your eyes and now you see. “I see that I did that. I admit it. I
get it. I atone for my er ror. I am willing to mak e amends. I
am willing to mak e it right. And I pray to become a better
person now .”
In the moments when you acted out of your shadow, you
didn’t wak e up that mor ning and say, “I think I’ll be a jerk
today .” You didn’t go into a meeting and say, “I’m going to
say and do things that mak e people r eject me.” No, in those
moments, you didn’t r ealize you wer e doing it. Y ou wer e at
the eﬀect of the shadow . The shadow cast you into
darkness, and you wer e blinded to the light. And so you
suﬀer ed.The shadow leads us to do something stupid and then
punishes us savagely for having been so dumb. The shadow
has no mer cy, but God does. Hell is what the shadow
creates her e, and love is what delivers us fr om it. Atonement is an aspect of God’s love. As we atone, we ar e
freed fr om our dysfunctional patter ns and the trajectory of
events they pr oduced. This is the miracle of personal
transfor mation. Having deliver ed our wr ong-minded past
decisions to God, we can say, with a line fr om a prayer in A
Course in Miracles,  “I will not feel guilty, for the Holy Spirit
will undo all consequences of my wr ong decision if I will let
Him.” Once you atone with a sincer e and humble heart, you
are released fr om the k armic maelstr om of your shadow
drama. Once we have owned who we ar e in the shadow, we can
continue our jour ney back into the light. W e don’t heal by
pouring pink paint over our issues, pr etending they’r e not
there or blaming them all on other people. W e heal by
knowing that whatever shadows hide our light ar e
headquarter ed inside our own minds. It is our r esponsibility
to admit that they’r e ther e, open the door to God, and let
Him shine them away . He always has, and He always will. FORGIVE Y OURSELF , FORGIVE THEM
Someone might have hurt you ﬁf teen years ago, and you’r e
still not shutting up about what that person did to you. But if
you’r e honest with yourself, you might have hurt someone
else ﬁf teen years ago and you haven’t even look ed at it for
the last fourteen. W e’re very big on seeing what other
people did to us, but we’r e not so big on looking at what we
might have done to others. The shadow has no pr oblem focusing on the shadow—as
long as it’s the shadow in other people! “That person is
acting out of his shadow, and that person is acting out ofher shadow, and all those other people ar e acting out of
their shadow—but me? What shadow?” Mor e damage is
inﬂicted by people who think they have it all together than
by people who have been humbled by the r ealization that
they pr obably do not. P eople who have look ed deeply into
the shadow know that it’s not just a little thing or a trivial
mistak e—it’s a cosmic counterfor ce to the goodness of the
world, and it tak es any opportunity pr esented it to wr eak
havoc on the human heart. Nothing is a gr eater opportunity
for the shadow than our thinking that all our pr oblems lie in
other people. A projection of guilt onto others is endemic to the mortal
world. From the moment we’r e bor n, we’r e taught a belief
system that r einfor ces our sense of separateness: “I’m in
my body, and you’r e in yours. And God is outside us both.”
More fractur ed per ception emanates fr om our sense of
separation than fr om any other thing. First of all, if I’m separate fr om God, then I am separate
from my sour ce, and I feel traumatized the way a baby is
traumatized if ripped away fr om the mother . This trauma
induces fear, and I am then lik ely to be trigger ed by any
person or situation that seems to be taking fr om me what I
think I need—even if that’s not the case. My shadow would
likely manifest as paranoia or neediness. Second, if I’m separate fr om the r est of the world, then I
feel powerless, given that I am so small and the world is so
huge. This sense of separation leads me to believe that I am
weak, when in fact, as a child of the divine, I have inﬁnite
resour ces of str ength within. My shadow would then lik ely
manifest as my playing small and being too fearful to stand
in my own str ength. Third, if I’m separate fr om other people, then I am
separated fr om the e xperience of love and unity that is my
birthright as a human being. I cannot help but feel a deep
existential loneliness instead of the joy that I am meant to
feel in the company of other people. My shadow would lik elymanifest as either overattachment or under -attachment to
others, a superiority or an inferiority comple x, manipulative
behavior, defensiveness, or a domineering or contr olling
personality . Last, all of the above aspects of separation involve a
sense of separation fr om self, fr om which all other for ms of
shadow emer ge. If I am separate fr om myself, and my true
self is love, then I am separate fr om love. My shadow would
likely manifest as anything seemingly not-love towar d
myself or others, fr om substance abuse to violence. Since all shadow manifestations ar e rooted in thoughts of
separation, then healing the mistak en thought that we ar e
separate fr om the r est of life—fr om our Cr eator, fr om other
people, and fr om other cr eated things—is the ultimate
solution to the pr oblem of the shadow . This r econciliation of
mind and spirit, the soul’s r eturn to its divine knowing, is the
point of illumination that casts out all darkness. And what is the light we see, when our minds ar e
reconciled to truth? W e see not only that we ar e one with
others, but also that all of us car ry seeds of the divine. W e
were created by God, in the image of God, in the lik eness of
God. W e are perfect, as all His cr eations ar e. We deserve
from ourselves and fr om each other the same mer cy that
God shows to each of us. And when we r emember this—
when our minds ar e healed of the delusion that our shadows
deﬁne us—then showing mer cy and for giveness comes
naturally . What is important is not the for m your shadow tak es. The
point is that your shadow developed for one r eason and one
reason only . In a moment, love lef t—or so you thought it did. It doesn’t matter if it lef t in the for m of a mother’s
abandonment or a father’s anger . What matters is that in
that traumatic, primal moment you lost conscious contact
with the e xperience of God’s love. And you went temporarily
insane. Now, every time that trauma is trigger ed, you go
insane again. The issue is not what caused the trauma. Itdoesn’t ultimately matter what mortal drama led up to it. What matters is that your spirit be r estor ed. What matters is
that you r econnect with love now, that your mind be healed
of its insanity now, that you for give yourself and others now. Forgiveness does not mean that you see the darkness, but
then give it amnesty . Rather, it means that you see the
darkness, but then choose to overlook it. And you overlook
it not because you ar e in denial, but because you know that
the shadow is not r eal. Ther e is negative denial, and ther e is
positive denial. Y ou ar e simply denying what is not ther e.
When you ar e needy, that is not the r eal you. When you
are acting out, that is not the r eal you. When you ar e angry,
that is not the r eal you. The r eal you is a divine, loving, and
changeless being. It can become temporarily invisible,
hidden behind a shadowy veil, but it cannot be uncr eated,
because God cr eated it. It is always ther e.
The shadow is an illusory self, the mask of an imposter . It
has “ real” eﬀects within the mortal world—fr om sabotaging
yourself to r epelling others—but for giveness means
extending your per ception beyond the r eal to the R eal,
beyond mortal darkness to the eter nal light. And when you
see that R eality, in yourself or others, you gain the power to
invok e it. W e heal when we feel for given. W e heal in the
presence of compassion. If you r eally want someone to
change, the miracle lies in your ability to see how perfect
they alr eady ar e.
The shadow does not leave when it is attack ed; it heals
when it is for given. W e do not tak e oﬀ our shadowy mask in
the pr esence of someone who blames us, but rather in the
presence of someone who says thr ough wor ds or behavior,
“I know this is not who you ar e.” W e miraculously heal in the
presence of someone who believes in our light even when
we ar e lost in our darkness. And when we lear n to see
others in the light of their true being, whether they ar e
showing us that light or not, then we have the power to
work that miracle for them.Forgiveness is an action, but it springs fr om an attitude. It
can be diﬃcult to for give someone whose behavior has hurt
us, unless we have gr ounded our per ceptions in a constant
eﬀort to see beyond the darkness of the personality . Spiritual practice is k ey to our power as light-bear ers, for
we cannot e xtend peace if we do not cultivate it. Our
thoughts and attitudes need persistent training in a world so
intent on convincing us that we ar e who we ar e not and that
we ar e not who, in fact, we ar e. The thinking of love is
completely opposite the thinking that dominates this world;
that is why we must be constantly reminded  of the light. Just as you tak e a shower or bath in the mor ning to get
yester day’s dirt oﬀ your body, you do your spiritual practice
in the mor ning to get yester day’s thinking oﬀ your mind and
heart. The world is constantly luring us into thoughts of fear
rather than love—attack, defense, anger, judgment, and so
forth. It would constantly convince us that the shadow is
real and that the light is not. “That person is a jerk. That
person is to blame. That person is guilty .” Or, conversely, “ I
am a jerk. I am to blame. I am guilty .” Yet projecting guilt
onto yourself is ultimately no less blasphemous than
projecting it onto others. Real for giveness means knowing that no one is actually
guilty . All of us ar e innocent in the eyes of God. It is our light
and not our darkness that is r eal. “RESIST YE NOT L OVE”
Given that Buddha was enlightened under the Bodhi tr ee
and paved the way for a life of compassion, given that
Moses simply touched the sea and it parted, given that
Jesus was r esurrected and r ose above death, you’d think we
would tak e those things mor e seriously .
_OceanofPDF.com_The_Shadow_Effect_-_Deepak_Chopra.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        As my dear friend Br ent BecV ar
shares, refusing to for give those who have hurt us “is lik e
being a dr owning person whose head is being held under
water by someone else. A t some point you r ealize that you
have to be the one who ﬁghts your way back to the
surface. ” The only way to battle heartache and the
oppressive natur e of our shadow is with for giveness and
compassion. F orgiveness doesn’t happen in our heads, but
in our hearts. It unfolds when we e xtract the wisdom and
the gif ts from even our dark est e xperiences and emotions. Forgiveness is the hallway between the past and an
unimaginable futur e. Stories lik e these demonstrate that we ar e all living in
accor dance with a gr eater plan and that, indeed, everything
happens for a r eason. Nothing occurs by accident, and ther e
are no coincidences. W e are always evolving, whether we
are awar e of it or not. Of tentimes this evolution is painful,
but the pain serves an important purpose. It is a necessary
ingredient in our divine r ecipe. By feeling the ache of
loneliness, our hearts open to r eceive mor e love; by
overcoming the people and situations that have oppr essed
us, we r ealize the depth of our str ength. When we ar e
willing to acknowledge that our pain, traumas, and
heartaches have in fact equipped us with wisdom essential
for our gr owth, we naturally for give and even bless those
who came into our life to teach us those diﬃcult lessons. Our lives ar e divinely designed for each one of us to get
exactly what we need to deliver our own unique e xpression
to the world. Our mind may tell us that bad is bad, good is good, and
that we can never r eally be all that we dr eam of being, but if
our shadow could talk, it would tell us otherwise. It would
tell us that our brightest light can shine only when we’ve
accepted our darkness. It would r eassur e us that ther e is
wisdom in every wound. It would show us that life is a
magical jour ney of making peace with both our humanity
and divinity. Our shadow would tell us that we deserve
better, that we matter, that we ar e mor e than we ever
dreamed possible, and that ther e’s light at the end of the
tunnel. As we embrace our shadow, we ﬁnd out that we ar e living
a divine plan, a plan so important, so vital for our own
evolution as well as for the evolution of humankind. Lik e the
lotus ﬂower that is bor n out of mud, we must honor the
darkest parts of ourselves and the most painful of our life’s
experiences, because they ar e what allow us to birth our
most beautiful self. We need the messy, muddy past, the
muck of our human life—the combination of every hurt,
wound, loss, and unfulﬁlled desir e blended with every joy,
success, and blessing to give us the wisdom, the
perspective, and the drive to step into the most magniﬁcent
expression of ourselves. This is the gif t of the shadow. OceanofPDF. comPART III
OceanofPDF. comOnly Light Can Cast Out Darkness
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON
In a world so ﬁlled with tender magic—fr om sleeping infants
to childr en playing, to lovers smiling, to friendships that last,
to ﬂowers blooming, to the violet hope of sunrise, to the
ﬁery magniﬁcence of sunset, to the brilliance of the body, to
the fragile glories of natur e, to the wonder of animals, to our
capacity to for give, to the mer cy of God, to the kindness of
strangers, and a list that could go on and on until it’s clear
that ther e really is no end to the manifold e xpressions of
love on earth—ther e is, as well, something else. And what is that. Why—in a world wher e we can be moved to tears by a
work of art—does ther e also e xist molestation, rape,
innocents with slit thr oats, unjustly held prisoners, starving
childr en, tortur e, genocide, war, slavery, and all manner of
horriﬁc and unnecessary suﬀering that e xists for no other
reason than that someone is cruel enough to inﬂict it or
someone else doesn’t car e enough to stop it. What for ce
exists, in our minds and in our world, that pr oactively and
seemingly ine xorably moves to cause the suﬀering and
destruction of living things. Why, if God is love, does evil e xist. We live in a world of constant juxtaposition between joy
that’s possible and pain that’s all too common. W e hope for
love and success and abundance, but we never quite for get
that ther e is always lurking the possibility of disaster. We
know ther e is good in the world, but we know that ther e is
something else as well. And we ar e living at a time when acontest between the two is both intense and intensif ying. Whatever it is that leads human beings to hate, to destr oy,
and to kill has tak en on a collective for ce lik e never befor e,
as technology and globalization now give it the capacity to
not just strik e, but to strik e us all, together, as one. Never
has ther e been such an ur gent need to dismantle this for ce,
whatever it is, that is so contemptuous of love and intent on
destr oying us all. This is not just a for ce that seeks to
inconvenience us. It is a for ce that wishes to see us dead. Yet this for ce is in fact an antifor ce. It does not so much do
anything, as it gets us to do its bidding. It is a place wher e
we have for gotten who we ar e, and thus act as we ar e not. It
is a darkness that, lik e all darkness, is not an actual
presence, but is rather the absence of light. It is a black hole
in psychic space that e xists when light is unseen for even a
moment. And the only true light is love. The pr oblem of what to do with this darkness—called by
many names but her e termed the “shadow”—is a question
that has plagued humanity since its earliest beginnings. There has never been, that we know of, a community or
civilization on earth in which love pr evailed at all times. Y et
we continue to dr eam of it. Such a state, accor ding to
certain r eligions of the world, is called paradise. Certain
religious and spiritual te xts suggest we have an ancient
memory of such a state, though this state was not of the
earth at all. It was our spiritual beginnings, a dimension of
pure love whence we come and to which we passionately
long to r eturn. The fact that we live at times, even most of
the time, so separated fr om this state of pur e love is a
psychic ruptur e of such intense pr oportions as to traumatize
us every moment of our lives. Just as the planet moves so
fast that we can’t even feel we’r e moving, we’r e
traumatized at such a deep level that we don’t even know
we’re in trauma. Separated fr om love, we ar e separated fr om God. Separated fr om God, we ar e separated fr om ourselves. Andseparated fr om ourselves, we ar e insane. In the wor ds of Mahatma Gandhi, “The pr oblem with the
world is that humanity is not in its right mind. ” That is the
problem with the world, indeed. Ther e is a place we go into,
both individually and collectively, that is the absence of who
and what we ar e and what we ar e her e to do. It is an
inversion of our power, a perversion of our identity, and a
subversion of our mission on earth. The pr oblem is this is not so obvious when we ar e actually
there, for it is a place of gr oss, cosmic confusion. W e are
prone to feel, when we ar e separated fr om love, that our
anger is justiﬁed, our blaming another is only r easonable,
and our attacking someone is in righteous self -defense even
when it is not. Either that, or worse. A t times, a person—
sometimes even whole nations—can become so suck ed into
the black hole of lovelessness as to be at the eﬀect of its
most e xtreme, even heinous intentions, for this thing, which
is actually a no -thing, is not inert. Human consciousness is
like a pilot light that never goes oﬀ. The pr oblem is it is used
to create either a life-pr oducing heat or a life-destr oying
conﬂagration. Wher e ther e is no love, ther e is fear. And fear,
once it has gripped the mind, is lik e a vice that thr eatens to
crush the soul. So that’s what it is, this thing we call the shadow. It does
not appear, in most of our lives, as a gigantic ﬁr e, but
simply as a slow bur n. It is you when you mak e the stupid
remark, hurting someone you love and possibly ruining a
relationship. Or you when you do the stupid thing that
sabotages your car eer. Or you when you pick up the drink,
although you know you’r e an alcoholic and that if you
continue doing this it will kill you. In other wor ds, it is the
you within you that does not wish you well. It is your
shadow, and it can only be eliminated by shining forth your
light. God’s love both dwells within us and e xtends out fr om us
every moment of every day. When we ar e living inalignment with our true selves as God cr eated us, we
receive love constantly and then e xtend it outwar d as we
have r eceived it. That is what it means to live in the light. Yet as commonsensical as this sounds, it does not feel lik e
common sense when someone has behaved in a way that
seems undeserving of our love. A t such a moment,
extending our love to that person feels lik e the wr ong thing
to do, and withholding our love feels right. That moment—
that little bit of unloving thought that seems lik e just a tiny
thing, just a r easonable judgment—is the r oot of all evil. It is
the cor nerstone of the shadow’s thought system, for it
involves a separation fr om God and a casting of blame. God
never withholds love, and we achieve sanity by lear ning to
love as God loves. Our task, if we ar e to cast out the shadow, is to lear n to
think only immortal thoughts, even though we live on the
mortal plane. Our higher thought for ms will lif t the
frequency of the planet, and the world will then transfor m. But what about now. What mak es us for get who we ar e,
thus tur ning oﬀ the light and splitting the world into two
separate states—love and fear. It is one thought: that
someone is guilty. How we deal with human imperfection is
the essential question that decides whether we dwell in the
shadow or in light. God does not look at a person who has made a mistak e
the same way we do. God does not seek to punish us when
we have made mistak es, but to cor rect us. When we r eturn
to our right minds, loving unconditionally and unwaveringly,
then the world itself will self -correct. That does not mean we lose discer nment, boundaries, or
brain cells. Divine love is not a weakness. God’s love is not a
gooey love. It’s not even always “ nice,” in a kind of pink,
fuzzy way. It involves radical truth telling, the kind of truth
that the heart knows even when the mind r esists it. It has
less to do with style and mor e to do with substance. Ther e
are ways to very sweetly withhold love, putting too muchemphasis on a half -baked understanding of the wor ds
“positive” and “supportive” and ther e are ways to e xtend
love with a kind of harshly r ealistic honesty that only
appears, much later, to have been love at all. It is time for all of us to get deeply serious about love. In
the wor ds of Dr. Martin L uther King, Jr. , it is time to inject
“new meaning into the veins of human civilization. ” W e
need to e xpand our sense of love beyond the personal, to its
social and political implications as well. Only in doing so will
we cast out darkness that now hangs lik e a specter above
the world. Living in the darkness, we ar e living in the
shadow. And in the shadow, suﬀering r eigns. IT MIGHT NOT BE REAL, BUT IT SURE L OOKS REAL
Sometimes you have a ﬁght with someone you love and you
can’t even believe it’s happening. It feels lik e a nightmar e. You actually hear yourself saying, “This can’t be
happening. ” And that’s because it isn’t—you ar e lost in a
parallel universe, a hallucination of separation and conﬂict. Years ago, I told myself not to wor ry about the Devil,
because that was all in my mind. And then I r emember what
happened ne xt. I simply stood ther e, stopped in my tracks
by the thought that, in fact, that was the worst place it
could possibly be. I’m not so much comforted by the idea
that ther e’s no Devil out ther e stalking the planet for my
soul, as stagger ed by the idea that ther e is an ever -present
tendency within my own thinking to per ceive without love
and thus mak e myself miserable. So wher e did this “tendency” come fr om. If God is love
and love only, and God is all-powerful, then how did a
counterfor ce ever come into being. The answer, metaphysically, is that actually it did not. Nothing but God’s love e xists, and in the wor ds of A Course
in Miracles,  “What is all-encompassing can have noopposite. ” The operative r eason for how an illusory world
that actually does not exist but seems so str ongly to exist
came into being is the principle of fr ee will. We can think whatever we want to think. Our thoughts,
however, have power no matter what we think, because our
creative power comes fr om God. The law of cause and eﬀect
guarantees that we will e xperience the r esult of whatever it
is we choose to think. When we think with love, we ar e
cocreating with God and ther efore cocr eate mor e love. When we think without love, however, we manufactur e fear. What that means is that we have split minds. One part of us
dwells in the light, eter nally at one with God’s love. Y et
another part of us—a part most of ten aligned with the
mortal world—dwells in darkness. And that is the shadow
self. God doesn’t see the shadow because, not being love, it
does not actually e xist. Y et being all-love Himself, He
register ed our suﬀering when we fell into the darkness and
provided for us an instantaneous healing. In that moment,
He cr eated a loving alter native to our self -imposed insanity
and fear. This alter native is lik e a divine ambassador that
dwells with us in the world of darkness, always available to
lead us back to light, should we r equest it. This ambassador
has many names, fr om Thought A djuster to the Holy Spirit. For our purposes her e, we will call it the Illuminator. In A Course in Miracles,  it is said that we ar e not perfect or
that we would not have been bor n—but that it is our mission
to become per fect her e. It is our mission to transcend the
shadow and become our true self. The Illuminator acts as a
bridge between our shadow self and our light. It has been
empower ed by God to use all the for ces of heaven and earth
to lead us out of the darkness back into light. It does so ﬁrst
and for emost by r eminding us that the darkness is not r eal. When we ar e lost in the darkness, our gr eatest power lies in
calling on the Illuminator, whose task is to separate truth
from illusion. W e do this thr ough prayer, and thr oughwillingness. “I’m willing to see this diﬀer ently” is a sentence
that gives the Illuminator per mission to enter into our
thought system and lead us fr om insanity back to truth. A few years ago I went to visit a friend, who alr eady had
several close girlfriends at her home when I ar rived. One
woman in the gr oup had a manner of speaking that seemed
to me very grandiose, so much so that every time she spok e
I felt as if someone wer e running ﬁnger nails acr oss a
blackboar d. Obviously my mind was wild with judgment, as I
could not understand how someone could possibly be so
aﬀected in the way she spok e. As a seek er on the path, I knew that the pr oblem was not
with the woman, but within myself—my own lack of
compassion. I inwar dly said a prayer and e xpressed my
willingness to see her diﬀer ently. Almost instantly, or so it
seemed to me, one of the other women in the r oom said to
the woman whom I’d been judging so ﬁer cely, “I hear d your
father is being let out of prison. Is that true. ”
As I listened, I hear d her story unfold. Although I don’t
remember all the speciﬁcs, I do r emember that this woman
had been held captive by her own father thr oughout much
of her childhood in the basement of their home. She had
eventually been r escued, and her father had gone to jail for
many years. Hearing of this woman’s suﬀering, I r ealized
why she spok e the way she did. She literally had no model
of a healthy adult persona gr owing up; she didn’t even know
how to speak in a natural way and was doing her best to
piece together what she consider ed a nor mal personality. The same mannerisms that had ar oused in me such
judgment ﬁve minutes earlier now ar oused in me deep
admiration and compassion. She had not changed, but I
had. In praying, I had called forth the light. The Illuminator
enter ed into the world of darkness and deliver ed me fr om
my shadow self, my judgmental self, by giving me the piece
of infor mation that would r eplace my thoughts of fear with
thoughts of love. And wher e, in this lifetime, had I gotten my tendency to
judge so harshly to begin with. F rom a metaphysical
perspective, I was not bor n with it. W e are not bor n in
original sin, or er ror, but in fundamental and primal
innocence. I seem to have a very powerful birth memory. I can’t know
of course whether it’s actually true, but I’ve had it for as
long as I can r emember. I even r emember seeing the light
ﬁxtur e that hangs over operating tables, which adds to my
feeling that this might be true. A ccording to the memory, I
came into this world with an inﬁnite amount of love to give,
beyond anything I’ve allowed myself to feel since. But this was in 1952, when doctors still thought they wer e
supposed to slap newbor n babies to get them to br eathe. So
just as I felt this e xtraor dinary love beaming out of me to all
living things, in the very ne xt moment I felt myself slapped. The doctor, whom I alr eady loved, had hit me. I r emember
being absolutely and totally confused, hurt, and
traumatized. Why would he do that. I just could not believe
that this had happened. And then my mind went blank. I
descended into whatever I descended into, and that was
that. That memory, or whatever it is, speaks to the question of
whether we ar e bor n with the shadow. The answer is no, we
are bor n in perfect love. But whoever we ar e and whatever
we have been thr ough, something or someone—of ten with
the best of intentions—casts us into the r ealm of shadow,
and the task of the r est of our lives will be to e xit the
darkness and r eturn to light. From that one moment as a newbor n—that one traumatic
split fr om love that r eenacted within me the separation of all
humanity fr om the love at our cor e—I would be for ever
tempted to lose sight of love. Having been denied love,
even for a moment, I am now tempted to deny love to
others. And the purpose of my life, as it is the purpose of allour lives, is to r emember the love within me by
remembering its pr esence in everyone else. The woman at my friend’s house, admirable though she
was, tempted me at ﬁrst to judgment. But I ask ed for help,
and I was given it. As soon as I was willing to see the light in
her, my own light r eturned. And the shadow was gone. WHERE THERE’S NO L OVE, EXPECT FEAR
Any thought not ﬁlled with love is an invitation for the
shadow to enter. We are led to believe in the myth of
neutrality : that we don’t r eally need to love as long as we
don’t actively do har m. But every thought either heals or
harms. The inﬁnitely cr eative power of thought guarantees
that whatever we choose to think will r esult in an eﬀect. If I
do not choose to love—if I choose to withhold my love at all
—then in that moment ther e is cr eated a psychic void. And
fear will rush in to ﬁll the space. This applies to my thoughts about others and to my
thoughts about myself. Having focused on aspects of
someone else’s shadow, I cannot but enter my own: the
angry one, the contr olling one, the needy one, the dishonest
one, the manipulative one, and so forth. Once I enter the
darkness of blame and judgment, I’m blinded to my own
light and cannot ﬁnd my better self. Or having for gotten the essential truth of my own being—
not appr eciating myself by appr eciating the divine light that
dwells within me—I fall easily into the trap of self -
destructive behavior. I engage in whatever for m of self -
sabotage will mak e others for get, as I have for gotten, who I
really am. Whether we ar e attacking others or attacking
ourselves, the shadow pr ovides the temptation to thoughts
of destruction and insanity. The mind in its natural state is in constant communion
with the spirit of love. But the shadow, lik e love, has itsambassadors within us—thoughts that lur e us constantly to
perceive in a loveless way. “He said he would hir e me and
he didn’t; he is such a bastar d. ” “Her politics disgust me; I
can’t stand her. ” “Eat the whole cak e; it doesn’t matter
what the doctor said. ” “It doesn’t matter if you k eep that
money; they will never know. ” The world is dominated by
thoughts of fear, and we ar e constantly fortiﬁed in our
shadow beliefs. In the absence of prayer or meditation—an e xperience of
shared love between Cr eator and the cr eated—we ar e easily
tempted to per ceive without love, thus entering the shadow
zone within ourselves. Whether we ar e projecting guilt onto
others, actually har ming another, or engaging in addictive
or self -hating behavior that hurts primarily ourselves, the
shadow e xerts an ugly inﬂuence. Yet why should we be surprised. Most of us wak e up in the
morning and, in eﬀect, sur render our minds to darkness. The ﬁrst thing we do is tur n on the computer, r ead the
newspaper, or tur n on radio or television news. W e
download thought for ms of fear fr om literally all over the
world, allowing our minds, at a time when they ar e most
open to new impr essions, to be inﬂuenced by the fear -based
thinking that dominates our cultur e. Of course  we r espond
from shadow, for all we’ve look ed at is shadow. Of course
we feel depr essed, unhappy, out of sorts, and cynical. The
world is dominated by fear -based thinking, and on the
mortal plane fear speaks ﬁrst and fear speaks loudest. There’s no darkness to analyze her e, so much as light we
need to tur n on. In or der to avoid the clutches of the
shadow, we must constantly r each for the light. The voice of love is called in both Judaism and Christianity
the “still, small voice” for God. That is the voice of the
Illuminator, and even ﬁve minutes of serious meditation in
the mor ning can guarantee that it will guide our thinking
throughout the day. How much better this world would be if
more of us would cultivate the sacr ed in our daily lives. Ourbusyness is of ten our enemy, making it har d for us to slow
down long enough to br eathe in the ethers of the spiritual
planes. Just as we sometimes sit in fr ont of our computers
while a ﬁle is downloading, knowing ther e’s nothing we can
do to rush the pr ocess, so ther e is no way to simply give a
quick nod to love as we rush out the door in the mor ning
and e xpect the r ealms of darkness and fear to not invade
our day. In slowing down, we’r e mor e likely to cultivate quiet. Our
moder n lifestyle is too of ten pr ey to shadow thoughts for no
other r eason than that it’s too noisy. Too much television,
too much computer, too much outer stimulation diminishes
the light that is found only in r eﬂective and contemplative
thought. Silence is an attitudinal muscle we build up, giving
us the capacity to mor e easily transfor m the ener gies
conjur ed up by the shadow self. Another way to cultivate light is to commune with others
in a holy space. In spiritual gr oups joined in love and
devotion—r eligious or otherwise—a ﬁeld of love is magniﬁed
so that it lif ts all members in the gr oup up to a higher
vibration. When you ar e at chur ch, synagogue, twelve-step
meetings, or other gr oup meditations, listening to your
heart seems natural. Y our shadow self seems far away,
neither evident nor trigger ed. The temptation to enter your
shadow still e xists and needs to be dealt with, but one of
the ways the shadow is diminished is by joining with others
in the sear ch for light. When we’r e with other people who ar e saying, “I want to
listen to my heart, I need to ask what the most loving thing
would be, I want to be ethical, I want to hear God’s voice,”
then it becomes easier to live that way. Like any habit, it
becomes easier to cultivate when we’r e around others doing
the same. In developing the habits of spiritual practice, you
ground yourself in the light of your true being. If you do not
so gr ound yourself, do not be surprised when you say or do
things that you later r egret. On an average day in the life of an average person, the
number of shadow thoughts that come up is astr onomical. We do our best, we try to be good, but our brain is
constantly active, and the tendency towar d fear -based
thought is always ther e. But the Illuminator is ther e as well. And the Illuminator is authorized by God to give us whatever
help we need. Talking to my therapist one day, I was sharing with him
that I felt in a very negative place. I told him I was in a place
of self -loathing. He ask ed me, “What is your case against yourself. ”
I said, “I hate myself because I’m so negative. ” I could see
the ir ony, but I couldn’t laugh. Or maybe I did. He suggested that I try something. “ Be in the ﬂow of
gratitude,” he said. “Whenever you ar e having that kind of
negative thought, go into naming all the things you have to
be grateful for. ”
And I found that technique to be very powerful. F or hours,
I’d been on a rampage of negativity, but as soon as I began
the ﬂow of gratitude, it was as though my shadow
disappear ed the way the W icked W itch melted when
Dorothy thr ew water on her. And it was the same
phenomenon, r eally. The shadow isn’t even r eal. It just
appears so. And as soon as it’s e xposed to light, then the
darkness disappears. The pr oblem, then, was not just the
presence of my negativity, but the absence of my positivity. As soon as I ﬁlled my mind with gratitude, the shadow trait
of self -hatr ed could no longer e xist. In the pr esence of love,
fear is gone. But let us not under estimate the power of the shadow. It’s
not enough to just meditate sometimes; we should mediate
daily. It’s not enough, if you’r e a recovering addict, to attend
a meeting every once in a while; you should attend a
meeting every day. It’s not enough that we for give a few
people; we must try our best to for give every one, for only
love is r eal. If I withhold it fr om anyone, then I withhold itfrom myself. And it’s not enough to love only when it’s easy;
we must try to e xpand our capacity to love even when it’s
hard. The shadows that ar e lurking today, in our own
circumstances and ar ound our planet, demand nothing short
of sacr ed illumination if we ar e to cast them out. And each
of us can add to the light by adding to our love. Of course
we love our childr en, but it’s no longer enough to just love
our own childr en. W e must lear n to love the childr en on the
other side of town and the other side of the world. It’s easy
enough to love those who agr ee with us and tr eat us well. We must lear n to love those with whom we do not agr ee and
who have not necessarily tr eated us justly. Just as we work
to build up our muscles, we must work to e xpand our
capacity to love. There is only one thing that can triumph over our lower
self, our shadow self, and that is our higher self. And the
higher self dwells within the highest love of all: the love of
our Cr eator, in whom ther e is no darkness, no suﬀering or
fear. It is psychologically unr ealistic to under estimate the
power of the shadow, but it is spiritually immatur e to
under estimate the power of God. P rayer is not just a
symbol; it is a force. Meditation is not just something that
relaxes us; it is something that har monizes the ener gies of
the universe. F orgiveness doesn’t just mak e us feel better; it
literally transfor ms the heart. All the powers that emanate
from God ar e powers that will set us fr ee. To the shadow, the light is an enemy. But to the light, the
shadow is nothing. It simply does not e xist. BY THE W AY, IT’S ON THE MO VE
Consciousness is a dynamic, cr eative ener gy. It is not inert,
it is not stagnant. It is always e xpanding in whatever
direction it’s moving. Love will always build on love, andfear will always build on fear. The shadow is an ine xorable
drive towar d suﬀering and pain. Yet how does this thing—which itself is an illusion, which
itself has no life—act as though it does. The answer to that
is that although fear itself is not r eal, the power of thought
that car ries it is. Fear is lik e an e xplosive device, and
thought is the missile on which it rides. The mind is cr eated
to be a conduit of the divine, delivering e xplosions of love,
but fr ee will means we can dir ect it otherwise, should we
choose. Your mind is always either e xtending love or pr ojecting
fear as well as subconsciously planning how to do mor e of
the same. The shadow is your own mind tur ned against
yourself. Just as L ucifer was the most beautiful angel in
heaven befor e he fell and a cancer cell was a nor mal
working cell befor e it went haywir e, the shadow is your own
thinking tur ned in the wr ong dir ection. It is your self -hatr ed
masquerading as self -love. Y our shadow is as intelligent as
you ar e, because it is your own intelligence co -opted for
fear’s purposes. It has all the attributes of life, because it
has attached itself to your life. And lik e all life, it seeks to
preserve itself. Whenever love is near, the shadow becomes particularly
active in or der to guar d against its own demise. It knows
that love is its only r eal enemy. When the shadow senses
love, when it senses the light in you, it literally runs for its
life. The shadow will try, in whatever way possible, to
invalidate, suppr ess, mak e wrong the good in you—for it
knows that once you r emember the light of your true self,
it’s gone. And so it ﬁghts. Thus the well-known phrase, “ Love brings up everything
unlike itself. ” You met someone with whom your soul feels is
a sacr ed connection. Bewar e, you’r e likely to do something
stupid in that person’s pr esence. Y ou have an e xtraor dinary
chance to manifest your dr eams. Bewar e, you’r e likely tosabotage the opportunity. And that is the shadow : the evil
twin of your better self. Until ther e is a conscious movement away fr om fear
towar d love, the dynamic ener gy of fear will be acting as a
destructive for ce that tak es no prisoners. It can lead to
something as seemingly small as an incident in which you
say something stupid but har mless or as consequential as
an action that could actually ruin your life. W e should
neither under estimate its power nor doubt its viciousness,
for the shadow is on a rampage—sometimes in a slow and
long drawn- out fashion and sometimes mor e quickly—but it
is always intentional in the dir ection of pain. In Alcoholics Anonymous, it is said that alcoholism is a
“progressive disease. ” What this means is that it will not
stay put; if you’ve got a pr oblem with alcohol today, then
you’ll have even a bigger pr oblem with it tomor row unless
you deal with it. And its ultimate goal is destruction, even to
the point of death. An addiction such as alcoholism isn’t just
about alcohol; it’s about the movement of dark ener gy, a
shadow for ce that plagues both body and soul. And the
reason so many millions of addicts have gotten sober
through A A is that the pr ogram mak es it clear that only a
spiritual e xperience can save them. Only God is powerful
enough to over come the shadow, whatever its for m. When Jesus said, in the Bible, that we should be of good
cheer for he had “ overcome” the world, the wor d he chose
there is particularly fascinating. He didn’t say that he had
“ﬁxed” the world. He said that he had “ overcome” dark
forces, by being lif ted to the r ealm of consciousness wher e
lower thought for ms no longer had power to limit him. And
that is the shadow’s challenge to us: that we r each so high
for the light above—the deep sanity of a higher and mor e
loving perspective—that the shadow itself is r ender ed
powerless. GROUP SHADOWS
We all r ecognize the shadow when it tak es individual for m: a
person who is angry, contr olling, dishonest, violent, and so
forth. But sometimes it’s just as important to r ecognize the
collective shadow of a gr oup. Gr oups such as nations ar e
made up of individuals; ther efore it’s not surprising that the
personality characteristics of its members show up in the
collective behavior of the gr oup. But what is less obvious is
how ener gy cr eated in a gr oup—whether loving or fearful—
is magniﬁed; the ener gy of two or mor e minds thinking in
the same way is not just the sum of those two. It incr eases
exponentially. Terrorism is an e xample. A pathological ideology can
spread lik e a cancer thr oughout an entir e population. Once
large enough numbers of people ar e enr olled in the
destructive thought for ms that mak e up the ideology, the
force of their combined ener gy can be truly confounding to
even the most technologically advanced purveyors of brute
force. The r eason this is true is that the actual power of the
terrorist thr eat lies not in its ideological r oots, but in the
passionate conviction with which so many people ar e drawn
into it. T errorists have conviction,  and ther ein lies their
power. Our power to over ride their destructive intensity lies
in our ability to love with as much conviction as they show
in hate. Hating with conviction, they draw forth mor e hatr ed;
when we love with gr eater conviction, we will draw forth
more love. Just as no person is perfect, so neither is any gr oup. The
shadow hides itself fr om the conscious awar eness of both
individual and collective, posing always as the light,
although it is the essence of darkness. A quote fr om R alph
Waldo Emerson describes the shadow of nationalism when
posing as patriotism: “When a whole nation is r oaring
Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to e xplor e the
cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart. ” It is of tenwhen a gr oup is violating its principles the most that it
claims to be standing up for them the most enthusiastically. The shadow is sly in the way it covers its tracks, whether
using r eligion as a cover for bur ning people at the stak e or
using patriotism as a cover for imperialistic misadventur es. But just as the collective shadow can bring us down, the
collective light can bring us up. Any gr eat literatur e; popular
expressions such as fairy tales, ﬁlms lik e Avatar,  and books
like the Harry Potter  series; and obviously, genuine r eligious
or spiritual gr oup practice—all ar e examples of collective
beams of light. In the movie Avatar,  the collective shadow of
contemporary America is on full display. We see the
danger ous mar riage of pr edatory capitalism to the full might
of American militarism, an intellectual haughtiness that
disallows defer ence to spiritual principles, an ar rogant
disregard for the sacr edness of the envir onment, and an
imperialistic tendency to tak e whatever it wants for no other
reason than that it wants to. The ugliness of America’s
shadow gets a full- on spotlight in this passion play of a ﬁlm. Yet what lif ts the story beyond mer e ﬁnger -pointing to the
level of illumination is its perspicacity r egarding the light
that is never too far fr om the shadow. The Illuminator is always poised to pr ovide an alter native
to darkness, drawing loving hearts to the scene of the
shadow the way r ed blood cells ar e drawn to a wound. Y es,
there are characters in the ﬁlm who r epresent our worst, but
there are also characters who r epresent our best, and that is
important. W ithin every individual as well as every gr oup,
the better angels of our natur e do e xist. Lik e darkness, they
are on the move (notice that angels ar e always pictur ed
with wings, while the Devil is not). And in the lar ger scope of
things, the light always wins out in the end. In the wor ds of
Martin L uther King, Jr. , “The moral ar c of the universe is
long, but it bends towar d justice. ” W e can for get the truth,
but the universe never does. Every person and every gr oup of people has a shadow;
that does not mak e us bad. It mak es us human. The point is
not to hate the shadow, for it is simply our wounded places
that need to be healed. But the point is not to deny the
shadow either, for darkness is only dispersed when it is
brought to light. W e must face the shadow, as individuals
and as gr oups; to do so is not an act of self -hate, but of self -
love. T rue pilgrims ar e those who face their darkness and
surrender it to the power of love; true patriots ar e those who
face the darkness of their nation and sur render it to the
power of truth. Even when we ar e lost in our shadow, ther e is a part of us
that knows better. Even in a gr oup that displays wr ong-
minded behavior, ther e are always individuals who hold out
for truth—whether Aryan Ger mans who hid Jews during
World W ar II at the risk of their own lives or the earthlings
who her oically came to the defense of the Na’vi citizenry of
Pandora in Avatar. Ther e is historical evidence as well as
mythical lor e that r eveal the ultimate triumph of love. The
signiﬁcance of W orld W ar II lies not only in the evil of Hitler,
but in the brilliance and sacriﬁce of those who defeated him. The ar chetypal truth of Avatar  lies not only in the violence
that was done to the Na’vi, but also in how the violence
ended. The ultimate point of gr eat religious stories is not the
cruciﬁxion but the r esurrection, not the slavery of the
Israelites but their deliverance to the P romised Land. Now,
in our day and age, with so many shadows thr eatening, it
behooves us to r emember that shadows appear very dark,
but ar e as nothing befor e true light. This truth can be very har d to accept, when all rational
evidence points not only to the r eality of the shadow, but
also to its per manence. The miracle of illumination,
however, does not come fr om rational evidence; it comes
literally fr om “out of the blue,” a consummate visual symbol
for the r ealms of pur e potentiality. The potential for inﬁnitebreakthr ough emer ges when our pr oactive embrace of the
light is even gr eater than our fear of the dark. We cannot per ceive that light with the body’s eyes. It is a
reality that calls for a diﬀer ent kind of seeing. Mortal
manifestation is “ real,” but only immortal love is “ Real. ” In
the wor ds of Albert Einstein when speaking of the physical
world, “ Reality is mer ely an illusion, albeit a very persistent
one. ”
If we identif y only with the mortal world, then fear does
indeed seem justiﬁed. But if we e xtend our per ceptions
beyond this world, then we see things in a higher and mor e
hopeful light. W e see that it’s pr ogrammed into the true
natur e of things that love will always r eassert itself. Although we ar e doomed to fall into the shadow—to
descend into the psychic underworld of our own unhealed
places—we ar e also guaranteed deliverance. The Illuminator
is an eter nal pr esence, active not only within the individual
heart, but also within the collective psyche. When
individuals humble themselves, asking for for giveness and
correction, then mer cy ar rives. And the same is true for a
group. When Ger man chancellor Ger hard Schr oeder
apologized to the P olish people for the mur der of half a
million P oles during W orld W ar II, and when P ope John P aul II
apologized for the Inquisition, such “puriﬁcation of
memory,” as these admissions wer e described by the late
pope, called down a light fr om the consciousness of heaven
and shadows wer e dispersed. Individuals ar e on a path of destiny, and so ar e groups. Sometimes, we tak e two steps forwar d into love and then
one step back into the shadow. But the lur e of the light is in
the ﬁnal analysis much gr eater than the lur e of the dark. GOOD INTENTIONS ARE NOT ENOUGHThe moder n mind has undeservedly high self -esteem; it is
arrogant in its belief that it can simply “decide” what it
wants and then mak e it happen. Y et think of the things that
fall away fr om its grasp: the end to unnecessary suﬀering,
world peace, a healthy planet. Why, in a world so full of
genius, does the shadow still lurk and cause the pr oblems it
does. One of the r easons the moder n world r emains at the eﬀect
of the shadow is that it fails to r ecognize the shadow’s
metaphysical r oots. Evil is an ener gy, just as love is an
energy. It arises fr om fear, and fear arises fr om
lovelessness. T rying to eradicate darkness only by material
means is to deal with it on the level of eﬀect, but not cause. You can cut oﬀ a wart, but it will gr ow back unless its r oots
are bur ned out. And the r oots of evil ar e not material. But ther e is a diﬀer ence between nonmaterial ener gy that
is simply mental and the kind that is spiritual. Many people
today have an inﬂated view of the power of “intention. ” But
in fact, as it says in A Course in Miracles,  your good
intentions ar e not enough. F or alcoholics, mer ely intending
to no longer drink will not quite do the trick; mer ely
intending  to be a better spouse is not quite enough, if an
actual change in behavior is necessary. Yet sometimes the
change of behavior that is called for in life is not so easy to
achieve. Mer e intention to do better can be over ridden by
the power of the shadow. The shadow can over ride our best
intentions, and only love can over ride the shadow. Love is God, and God is love. Whether people call on God
using the name “ God” or simply give up all r esistance to
love—in which case God is pr esent, even if unacknowledged
—the divine power of love is the only power gr eat enough to
cast out evil. Whether it’s the wisdom to know that feeding
more of the starving childr en of the world is one of the best
ways to eliminate futur e terrorist thr eats, or sur rendering
our character defects to God for healing and asking that
they be r emoved, ther e is a defer ence to the higher powerof love without which we cannot over come the power of
fear. The shadow’s lair is not in your conscious mind, but in
your subconscious mind. Y ou don’t consciously  decide to do
the stupid thing. Y ou don’t consciously  decide to say
something that would mak e your spouse hate you. Y ou don’t
consciously  decide to get drunk at your daughter’s wedding
and ruin everything. “The Devil made me do it” is not as
unsophisticated a notion as it sounds. Good intentions mak e
the Devil laugh. But what don’t mak e him laugh ar e prayer,
atonement, for giveness, and love. Those things mak e him
leave. Which brings up the question of r eligion. Why, if r eligion is
a conduit for divine love, does so much evil still lurk in the
world and even within its own ranks. How does one of the
largest r eligious institutions in the world come to harbor
pedophiles in its priesthood. And the answer of course is
that some r eligion has nothing at all to do with God. In fact,
if anything, the shadow—the ener getic counterfor ce to God
—loves to play in the ﬁelds of r eligion. It loves to confuse,
and it’s deﬁnitely confusing to the mind when doctrine or
dogma based on love is actually a cover for the gr ossest
lovelessness. If a religious person hates, God is not pr esent. If an atheist
loves, then ther e He is. As it says in A Course in Miracles,
the line in the Bible that “ God shall not be mock ed” means
that He isn’t. When seeking r eligious discer nment, however, it’s
important to not thr ow out the baby with the bathwater. The
Latin r oot of the wor d “religion ” is religio,  which means to
“bind back. ” R eal religion—whether it occurs within the
conte xt of an or ganized institution or a mor e universal
spirituality—r econnects us to the truth of who we ar e, to the
love at our cor e, and to the compassion that heals. The only
way to over come the shadow is to become our true self, and
whatever it is that tak es us to that place is in its essence areligious e xperience. F or some people, that is an e xperience
at chur ch, synagogue, mosque, or shrine; for some, it is the
experience of a spiritual or psychotherapeutic practice; for
some, it is the e xperience of natur e; for some, it is the
experience of holding their child in their ar ms for the ﬁrst
time. The point is not what gets us to the e xperience, but
rather what happens to us and within us once we ar e ther e. Something changes in us once we have r eturned to the cor e
of our being, if even just for a moment. It gives us a taste of
what’s possible, within us and ar ound us. It lif ts the veil that
shrouds the r eality of love, and the e xtent of our true power. Once we’r e realigned with our essential natur e, we’ll have
the power to mak e shadows disappear. According to A Course in Miracles,  “miracles occur
naturally as e xpressions of love. ” Whenever our hearts ar e
open, the darkness is r eplaced by light. In the meantime—
whether it’s in a type of medicine that doesn’t include a
holistic perspective, a r eligion that doesn’t include love, a
therapy that doesn’t include a higher power, or a
relationship that doesn’t include a sacr ed dimension—the
shadow will hover ar ound the door until some moment of
fear. Then at that point it will steal thr ough the darkness and
put a stak e through the heart of someone’s dr eams. OWNING AND A TONING
No matter how much we understand about the shadow, the
point is to get rid of it. But to do this, we must own it ﬁrst. The solution to the pr oblem of the shadow, in both Jewish
and Christian thought, is the principle of atonement. It is the
idea that once we have acknowledged our sins and
surrender ed them to God with true r emorse, we ar e
released fr om their spiritual consequences. (“Sin ” derives
from an ar chery ter m meaning you’ve missed the mark; the
spiritual meaning of the wor d “sin ” is “er ror. ”)Buddha described the law of karma, which basically
means cause and eﬀect—action, r eaction, action, r eaction. The principle of atonement means that in a moment of
grace, bad k arma is bur ned. A tonement is a kind of cosmic
reset button, by which mortal shadow thoughts ar e undone
and r eplaced by the perfection of love. In the Catholic r eligion, the practice of confession is an
ongoing e xperience of atonement, as penitents confess
their sins and ask God for for giveness. In the Jewish r eligion,
the Day of A tonement, or Y om Kippur, is the holiest day of
the year. On that day, Jews admit and ask for giveness for all
sins committed during the year leading up to that day; they
ask God for the chance to be inscribed for another year in
the Book of Life. In Alcoholics Anonymous, addicts ar e
advised to tak e a fearless moral inventory, admitting their
character defects and asking God to r emove them. All of
these ar e examples of the spiritual pr ocess by which the
shadow, when br ought to the light, is then transfor med
through the power of atonement. Atonement e xists because it is necessary. We are all
human, we ar e all wounded, and we all fall pr ey to the
shadow side of human e xistence. W e have all fallen, yes,
but we ar e not without the means to rise back up. In or der
to do so, however, we must commit to the power that
rebuilds our wings. W e must be willing to bring our darkness
to light and to consciously and willingly sur render it to God. Let’s say I have come to r ealize that a diﬃcult situation in
my life was caused by my own er ror or personality defect. Perhaps I was contr olling in a r elationship and so cr eated
conﬂict with a friend or family member. Atonement calls for
me to r ecognize my shadow aspect—in this instance, my
contr olling natur e—and ask God to r emove it. As we’ve discussed befor e, it’s not enough to just say,
“Okay, I won’t be contr olling anymor e. ” That is certainly a
good r esolution and may go a long way towar d cor recting
behavior. But when a trait is an actual patter n within yourpersonality—a shadow face you wear that is truly you at
your worst or near worst—then it has become entr enched
within your attitudinal matrix. It is not enough to just decide
to be diﬀer ent, because the shadow has over ridden your
normal decision-making powers. Once a shadow persona
has developed—you the cynical, you the jealous, you the
raging—then healing r equir es that you atone: that you tak e
responsibility for the damage you might have alr eady done
and ask God to change your heart. It is critically important that we look deeply at our own
thoughts and actions—particularly wher e they have been
mistak en. In doing so we ar e addr essing not only our
individual shadow, but the collective shadow as well. Ultimately, the healing of the world will emer ge not fr om our
changing and cor recting others, but fr om our willingness to
change and cor rect ourselves. Since all minds ar e joined,
our ability to self -correct has a cor rective inﬂuence on the
entire universe. In a very r eal way, it’s the only thing that
does. This cor rection might begin with a nudge fr om conscience. Conscience is healthy shame—a temporary discomfort that
comes not fr om the shadow, but fr om the light. It is only a
sociopath, af ter all, who feels no r emorse. It is part of what
makes us human, that something in us knows when we
have been wr ong. The pr ocess of atonement involves courage, compassion,
and honesty with oneself : “I bring this up. I r ealize it is my
wound. I’m willing to look at it, and I’m willing to change. ” It
is so easy, when a situation is diﬃcult, to cast all blame for
the pr oblem onto others. But the true seek er says, “What
did I do wr ong. What was my part in this disaster. ”
If we don’t look at wher e we’r e dishonest, harsh,
unfor giving, disr espectful, gr eedy, domineering, and so on,
then we cannot change that thing. If we just suppr ess our
shadow, trying to disown it, then it e xists as an unintegrated
fractal of our personality. And we have no power over whatwe have not e xplor ed. Whatever it is, it will act lik e an
emotional ter rorist embedded within our psyche, able to
ambush us at any time. It will mak e itself known in one
situation or another as a psychic scr eam we cannot ignor e. This is natur e’s brilliant way of for cing us to look at
something, for nothing gets our attention lik e going thr ough
a personal disaster and knowing that we caused it. The shadow acts lik e a series of land mines in your
personality. You think you’r e doing so well—you’ve got your
list together, your organization together, your business plan
together, your money together—you think you’ve got
everything so together, and then you go do something that
totally blows everything. Y ou can har dly believe it. Nobody
else blew it— you blew it. And you ﬁnally r ealize that until
you deal with that part of your personality, you’ll pr obably
blow it again. I asked a woman once, “ Are you in a r elationship now. ”
And she said, “I hate who I am when I’m in a r elationship. I’d
rather not be in one. ” So many people can r elate. W e say to
ourselves, “I don’t even want to go out ther e. I don’t want to
attract a r elationship or a business opportunity or whatever,
until I have healed whatever part of myself that is sur e to
sabotage it when and if it happens. ”
It tak es courage to deeply look at ourselves, but we can’t
have r eal fr eedom and peace until we do. That’s why we
want to be car eful not to over emphasize a quick and easy
trip to happiness. Enlightenment gets us to joy, but not
immediately. First we must face the sor row that stands in
front of it. We must tak e the time to r eﬂect on our own dysfunction,
our shadows, because unless we look at them, they r emain
in place. But this can be har d. We heal thr ough a kind of
detox process, and sometimes we have to bur n through
diﬃcult feelings as they come up for r eview. Something
emer ges fr om the shadow of our subconscious mind, giving
us the chance to see it clearly, and we ar e hor riﬁed to thinkwe wer e ever lik e that. But we ar e not lef t at that place
without the Illuminator’s help. If we so choose, we can
surrender our darkness and ask that it be healed. God will
not tak e from us what we do not consciously r elease to Him,
for to do so would be a violation of our fr ee will. But what we
do sur render and atone for is then transfor med. Such inner work can be painful, but it is vital and
unavoidable. Emotional pain is important, just as physical
pain is. If you had br oken a leg and it wasn’t painful, how
would you know it needed to be reset. Physical pain is a
way the body says, “ Look at this. Car e for this. T end to this. ”
And psychic pain is the same. Sometimes we need to say, “I
need to tend to this pain. Why is it her e. What is this
situation trying to tell me. What part of myself do I need to
address. ” If you go to the doctor with a tor n knee, the
doctor doesn’t say, “W ell, let’s look at that elbow. ” It is the
same with God. The wound must be look ed at. And the
physician, both human and divine, is not ther e to judge you,
but to heal you. We’re often afraid of taking a good look at our shadow,
because we want to avoid the shame or embar rassment
that might come along with admitting our mistak es. W e feel
if we tak e a deep look at ourselves, we’ll be too e xposed. We don’t want to look at our own shadow, because we’r e
afraid of what we might see. But the only thing we should
actually fear is not looking at it, for our denial of the shadow
is exactly what fuels it. At ﬁrst you say, “I don’t want to look at it, because I’ll
hate myself. ” But then you say, “No, I have to look at it,
because otherwise I can’t r elease it to God. ” And something
counterintuitive and wonderful happens when you do. One
day I look ed at something in myself that I had been avoiding
because it was too painful. Y et once I did tak e a look, I had
an une xpected surprise. R ather than feeling self -hatr ed, I
was ﬂooded with compassion for myself, because I r ealizedhow much pain I would have had to be in to develop that
sort of coping mechanism to begin with. All of us ar e scar red, yet the pr oblem is that our scars
don’t show up as such in the eyes of other people. R ather,
they show up as character defects. If a thr ee-year-old is
screaming and crying, we’r e likely to say, “ Oh, the poor
darling is so tir ed. ” But when you’r e a crying and scr eaming
forty-year-old—even if your pain is dir ectly r elated to your
trauma as a thr ee-year-old—people don’t say, “ Oh, he’s so
tired. ” They say, “ He’s hor rible. ”
Your character defects ar e not wher e you’r e bad, but
wher e you’r e wounded. But no matter who or what caused
the wound, it’s yours now and you’r e responsible for it. The
only person who can bring it up and r elease it is you. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter wher e you got your character
defects anyway. They’r e yours now. You can’t live with a sign
around your neck saying, “It’s not my fault. My par ents wer e
diﬃcult. ” Y our only way out of your conundrum is to tak e
total r esponsibility for those defects. Your character defects ar e the way you self -sabotage, the
way you hurt yourself and others. That’s why you have to
look at them. Until you tak e complete r esponsibility for your
own e xperience, you can’t change it. But once you’ve truly
looked at yourself, you can start healing. Y ou’ve opened
your eyes and now you see. “I see that I did that. I admit it. I
get it. I atone for my er ror. I am willing to mak e amends. I
am willing to mak e it right. And I pray to become a better
person now. ”
In the moments when you acted out of your shadow, you
didn’t wak e up that mor ning and say, “I think I’ll be a jerk
today. ” You didn’t go into a meeting and say, “I’m going to
say and do things that mak e people r eject me. ” No, in those
moments, you didn’t r ealize you wer e doing it. Y ou wer e at
the eﬀect of the shadow. The shadow cast you into
darkness, and you wer e blinded to the light. And so you
suﬀer ed. The shadow leads us to do something stupid and then
punishes us savagely for having been so dumb. The shadow
has no mer cy, but God does. Hell is what the shadow
creates her e, and love is what delivers us fr om it. Atonement is an aspect of God’s love. As we atone, we ar e
freed fr om our dysfunctional patter ns and the trajectory of
events they pr oduced. This is the miracle of personal
transfor mation. Having deliver ed our wr ong-minded past
decisions to God, we can say, with a line fr om a prayer in A
Course in Miracles,  “I will not feel guilty, for the Holy Spirit
will undo all consequences of my wr ong decision if I will let
Him. ” Once you atone with a sincer e and humble heart, you
are released fr om the k armic maelstr om of your shadow
drama. Once we have owned who we ar e in the shadow, we can
continue our jour ney back into the light. W e don’t heal by
pouring pink paint over our issues, pr etending they’r e not
there or blaming them all on other people. W e heal by
knowing that whatever shadows hide our light ar e
headquarter ed inside our own minds. It is our r esponsibility
to admit that they’r e ther e, open the door to God, and let
Him shine them away. He always has, and He always will. FORGIVE Y OURSELF, FORGIVE THEM
Someone might have hurt you ﬁf teen years ago, and you’r e
still not shutting up about what that person did to you. But if
you’r e honest with yourself, you might have hurt someone
else ﬁf teen years ago and you haven’t even look ed at it for
the last fourteen. W e’re very big on seeing what other
people did to us, but we’r e not so big on looking at what we
might have done to others. The shadow has no pr oblem focusing on the shadow—as
long as it’s the shadow in other people. “That person is
acting out of his shadow, and that person is acting out ofher shadow, and all those other people ar e acting out of
their shadow—but me. What shadow. ” Mor e damage is
inﬂicted by people who think they have it all together than
by people who have been humbled by the r ealization that
they pr obably do not. P eople who have look ed deeply into
the shadow know that it’s not just a little thing or a trivial
mistak e—it’s a cosmic counterfor ce to the goodness of the
world, and it tak es any opportunity pr esented it to wr eak
havoc on the human heart. Nothing is a gr eater opportunity
for the shadow than our thinking that all our pr oblems lie in
other people. A projection of guilt onto others is endemic to the mortal
world. From the moment we’r e bor n, we’r e taught a belief
system that r einfor ces our sense of separateness: “I’m in
my body, and you’r e in yours. And God is outside us both. ”
More fractur ed per ception emanates fr om our sense of
separation than fr om any other thing. First of all, if I’m separate fr om God, then I am separate
from my sour ce, and I feel traumatized the way a baby is
traumatized if ripped away fr om the mother. This trauma
induces fear, and I am then lik ely to be trigger ed by any
person or situation that seems to be taking fr om me what I
think I need—even if that’s not the case. My shadow would
likely manifest as paranoia or neediness. Second, if I’m separate fr om the r est of the world, then I
feel powerless, given that I am so small and the world is so
huge. This sense of separation leads me to believe that I am
weak, when in fact, as a child of the divine, I have inﬁnite
resour ces of str ength within. My shadow would then lik ely
manifest as my playing small and being too fearful to stand
in my own str ength. Third, if I’m separate fr om other people, then I am
separated fr om the e xperience of love and unity that is my
birthright as a human being. I cannot help but feel a deep
existential loneliness instead of the joy that I am meant to
feel in the company of other people. My shadow would lik elymanifest as either overattachment or under -attachment to
others, a superiority or an inferiority comple x, manipulative
behavior, defensiveness, or a domineering or contr olling
personality. Last, all of the above aspects of separation involve a
sense of separation fr om self, fr om which all other for ms of
shadow emer ge. If I am separate fr om myself, and my true
self is love, then I am separate fr om love. My shadow would
likely manifest as anything seemingly not-love towar d
myself or others, fr om substance abuse to violence. Since all shadow manifestations ar e rooted in thoughts of
separation, then healing the mistak en thought that we ar e
separate fr om the r est of life—fr om our Cr eator, fr om other
people, and fr om other cr eated things—is the ultimate
solution to the pr oblem of the shadow. This r econciliation of
mind and spirit, the soul’s r eturn to its divine knowing, is the
point of illumination that casts out all darkness. And what is the light we see, when our minds ar e
reconciled to truth. W e see not only that we ar e one with
others, but also that all of us car ry seeds of the divine. W e
were created by God, in the image of God, in the lik eness of
God. W e are perfect, as all His cr eations ar e. We deserve
from ourselves and fr om each other the same mer cy that
God shows to each of us. And when we r emember this—
when our minds ar e healed of the delusion that our shadows
deﬁne us—then showing mer cy and for giveness comes
naturally. What is important is not the for m your shadow tak es. The
point is that your shadow developed for one r eason and one
reason only. In a moment, love lef t—or so you thought it did. It doesn’t matter if it lef t in the for m of a mother’s
abandonment or a father’s anger. What matters is that in
that traumatic, primal moment you lost conscious contact
with the e xperience of God’s love. And you went temporarily
insane. Now, every time that trauma is trigger ed, you go
insane again. The issue is not what caused the trauma. Itdoesn’t ultimately matter what mortal drama led up to it. What matters is that your spirit be r estor ed. What matters is
that you r econnect with love now, that your mind be healed
of its insanity now, that you for give yourself and others now. Forgiveness does not mean that you see the darkness, but
then give it amnesty. Rather, it means that you see the
darkness, but then choose to overlook it. And you overlook
it not because you ar e in denial, but because you know that
the shadow is not r eal. Ther e is negative denial, and ther e is
positive denial. Y ou ar e simply denying what is not ther e. When you ar e needy, that is not the r eal you. When you
are acting out, that is not the r eal you. When you ar e angry,
that is not the r eal you. The r eal you is a divine, loving, and
changeless being. It can become temporarily invisible,
hidden behind a shadowy veil, but it cannot be uncr eated,
because God cr eated it. It is always ther e. The shadow is an illusory self, the mask of an imposter. It
has “ real” eﬀects within the mortal world—fr om sabotaging
yourself to r epelling others—but for giveness means
extending your per ception beyond the r eal to the R eal,
beyond mortal darkness to the eter nal light. And when you
see that R eality, in yourself or others, you gain the power to
invok e it. W e heal when we feel for given. W e heal in the
presence of compassion. If you r eally want someone to
change, the miracle lies in your ability to see how perfect
they alr eady ar e. The shadow does not leave when it is attack ed; it heals
when it is for given. W e do not tak e oﬀ our shadowy mask in
the pr esence of someone who blames us, but rather in the
presence of someone who says thr ough wor ds or behavior,
“I know this is not who you ar e. ” W e miraculously heal in the
presence of someone who believes in our light even when
we ar e lost in our darkness. And when we lear n to see
others in the light of their true being, whether they ar e
showing us that light or not, then we have the power to
work that miracle for them. Forgiveness is an action, but it springs fr om an attitude. It
can be diﬃcult to for give someone whose behavior has hurt
us, unless we have gr ounded our per ceptions in a constant
eﬀort to see beyond the darkness of the personality. Spiritual practice is k ey to our power as light-bear ers, for
we cannot e xtend peace if we do not cultivate it. Our
thoughts and attitudes need persistent training in a world so
intent on convincing us that we ar e who we ar e not and that
we ar e not who, in fact, we ar e. The thinking of love is
completely opposite the thinking that dominates this world;
that is why we must be constantly reminded  of the light. Just as you tak e a shower or bath in the mor ning to get
yester day’s dirt oﬀ your body, you do your spiritual practice
in the mor ning to get yester day’s thinking oﬀ your mind and
heart. The world is constantly luring us into thoughts of fear
rather than love—attack, defense, anger, judgment, and so
forth. It would constantly convince us that the shadow is
real and that the light is not. “That person is a jerk. That
person is to blame. That person is guilty. ” Or, conversely, “ I
am a jerk. I am to blame. I am guilty. ” Yet projecting guilt
onto yourself is ultimately no less blasphemous than
projecting it onto others. Real for giveness means knowing that no one is actually
guilty. All of us ar e innocent in the eyes of God. It is our light
and not our darkness that is r eal. “RESIST YE NOT L OVE”
Given that Buddha was enlightened under the Bodhi tr ee
and paved the way for a life of compassion, given that
Moses simply touched the sea and it parted, given that
Jesus was r esurrected and r ose above death, you’d think we
would tak e those things mor e seriously. Section summary: 

Please summarize the main ideas presented here. 1 word count:
1500 words

Note:- Please maintain accuracy & clarity throughout the entire passage. Answer Summary :

Here's accurate summarizations for key concepts covered-

**Shadow Concept**: Marianne Williamson emphasizes "forgiving" the unknown forces causing harm worldwide due to 'free-will' choice-driven choices ('Illuminati'). Humans aren't born with original sin, resulting in dualities like hatred vs. , unconditional acceptance ("Love Wins"). Free Will allows creation/ manifestation via creative energy, creating divisions where fears arise. Acknowledge wounds using practices/prayers, surrender flaws/God-like forgiveness for growth/spiritural development. * **Forgivene ss**, Compassiona tion:** Healing requires recognizing mistakes/personalty traits through introspection/self-reflection, acknowledging innocence before condemning/shadow influences ((A Course); embracing empathy/forgiveneness offers redemption/redemption/growth/deliverance). •   *Group Shadows*: Collective responsibility towards shared experiences/moral obligations toward fellow humans/groups. Denial/hiding ignorance creates further chaos – Accept reality/reform accordingly. •    *Practical Applications:* Daily group gatherings/Meditation/Light-filled conversations reveal hidden truths/strength ; recognize, confront + reconcile internal conflicts; focus solely upon radiating positive vibrations/thought patterns/cosmic harmonizers. Inner transformation yields improved relations /personal transformations/better outcomes,

Other Key Points:
•     Reconciliation/Self-Awarenes s-Personification • Integrate Higher Self/I llumi natior/Wise Pr inciples-GuidancE



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Feel free share feedback/input/questions. Thank you 😊.
With forgiveness and compassion.
What is the only way to battle heartache and the oppressive nature of our shadow?
To acknowledge and surrender to our true selves, and seek guidance from the Illuminator.
What is the key to overcoming the power of the shadow?
The shadow is an illusion, while the light is the only reality.
What is the main difference between the shadow and the light?
To own our darkness, take responsibility for our actions, and seek to change our thoughts and behavior.
What is the ultimate solution to the problem of the shadow?
To acknowledge and atone for our own mistakes, and seek forgiveness and love.
What is the key to healing and transcending the shadow?