It also must be understood that Jung was a student of truth and a student of the Self.
His goal was not necessarily to elaborate a set of rules for ‘winning at life’. or winning at Society.
He would have seen integration of the Shadow as a worthy project in its own right. Not simply because it conferred greater advantages in our constant human jockeying for social position.
He was yet another great scholar of Projection.
Projection can be defined as: The diverse means by which a mind conspires to disown its own internal processes and to experience them as if they were being generated externally.
Spiders ‘project’ their webs more or less out of their asses.
And human beings do much the same with our experiences of reality.
This is part of the significance of the Freudian and Jungian concepts of the Unconscious. We’re talking here about Involuntary Reality Creation. That sounds very nice and theoretical, but it’s really just like wearing a pair of sunglasses for so long that you forget they are on your face. You (unconsciously) put on a pair of red sunglasses and then walking outside you exclaim, ‘Wow. What a Crimson World we live in!’
This is also part of the significance of the Shadow.
The bottom line of the Shadow is that it’s you.
It’s already you. Whether you choose to engage it or whether you choose to avoid it, it’s already you.
It’s already there.
The parts of you that are already here are influencing and creating your world. They are already doing it.
So learning to work with Shadow material, is like learning how your automobile works or how your house is constructed.
It’s not some sort of noble, heroic task. It’s a part of moving through the world with basic competence. (Okay, maybe it’s kind of heroic.)
We’re talking about levels of the Self with roots that stretch deeper than your daily desires.
Jung dives deep.
Detachment and Shadow-work both share in common that they are oriented toward developing an objective perspective on who and what you are.
And (here’s the part I think you may be overlooking), this includes having a perspective on the ‘I’ itself.
I suspect that, for you, the sense of ‘I’ is still extremely central to your view of who and what you are. There is nothing wrong with that. But you just need to realize that such a view is not objective. It’s healthy, much of the time. But it’s not objective. ‘
Think of that sense of ‘I’ and ‘Me’ as an object. Look at it. and then Jung’s concept of the Shadow, and the meaning of ‘letting go’ and Detachment will be easier to reconcile.
