It is because our shadow scares us that it assumes mythic proportions. The boogie man abounds: whether it’s Satan or Saddam Hussein and they become the targets of our attacks. We focus all our energy on eliminating what we’ve defined as the ‘axis of evil’ the thing on the outside, believing that this will make us whole. But by fighting evil with evil we are doing the very thing that we are condemning: violence and terror. It’s twice wrong. How can it ever be right? But evil always negates itself eventually. That’s how the good prevails. Before the shadow and before the vale.
There’s a cosmic law at work here. And you could say “The devil made me do it.”
But when you look the devil in the face and you finally realize that the devil is a coat on a rack that looked like a man lurking in your bedroom at night when you were a child: a figment of our collective fear given shape by the imagination and solidified in time. Everything that resonates in our common memory goes back at least 2000 years. And it’s all polarized. The story of Christ is a story of poles, symbolized by the cross: opposing forces, and One is crucified in the center.
The whole of religion, both Eastern and Western has been an idolization of the ego-personality who became a Christ or a Buddha or a Mohammed, or achieved mastery of any kind. The very thing they themselves warn not to do.
I believe that the situations of life bend you and break you and shape you and stretch you for this one purpose only, your own transformation from ego to spirit. Finally in some lucky lifetime it dawns on you that this is what’s happening, and you become “malleable” to the process. You stop resisting so much. It’s what Christ did and what Buddha did, and scores of others, to lesser degree. Their stories are all unique, and they manifest completely differently based on their character and circumstance. But always there is high drama before the transformation. And always, a confrontation with the shadow. What transforms them into extraordinary beings is their choice to love at the moments of crisis.
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but there is an absolute in these cases of the divine. their choices were predestined weren't they. Christ had his crisis so did the others but the example us humans follow is worked out after all. right from the beginning. you don't seem like an atheist or I wouldn't even stand a chance here. I chose the middle way, be it sacred or mundane, but I am human.
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