--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When the Terrorist planes flew into the Twin Towers on the fateful morning of September 11th, something became activated in the planetary psyche that changed the world forever. Before that shock, a complacency existed. Before that shock, many of us had never really wanted to open our eyes to see and face the imbalances and violence in our world, and if we did we would simply say to ourselves: "Well, that is the way things are and always have been. C'est la vie!"
But no longer. As those towers crumbled, something also shattered in our own psyches, which in many people gave rise to the realisation that violence and terrorism was no longer something that happened over there, to them; it was also a reality in our own midst and belonged to all of us.
It was Gurdjieff who warned us never to underestimate the transformational possibilities of shock. In his eyes, man being the "spiritually asleep" creature that he was, if he wished to wake up he generally needed to experience a shock greater than the sum of his own inertia. And that is exactly what has happened. The word crisis in Chinese is translated "dangerous opportunity." And this is what we now face.
For a long time, there has existed what we might call an "Alternative Movement" on the planet. Whether we refer to those comprising it as Alternativists, social or spiritual activists, or Aquarian Conspirators, radical philosophers, ecological warriors, peacemakers, New-Agers or whatever, does not matter. What is significant is that many people have come up with ingenious solutions to our world problems, and are in touch with important antidotes to help our planet work more effectively and be a healthier place in which to live.
But always the problem has been the "powers that be", or the pedagogical forces - those who "run things". They have always resisted, closed their eyes, said, "no" to innovation.
September 11th, however, has changed this. The events of that date have catalysed a whole new climate of potential openness to change, and while this may not yet be visible (as I write, bombs are still dropping in Afghanistan) we must not forget to look beneath the surface. I have travelled quite extensively since September 11 th and wherever I have been, I have encountered people asking many new questions - talking about the need to have a new kind of world come into being, a kinder, gentler more humane world, and who are prepared now, for the first time, to do something to have this come about. In the words of Christopher Fry in his play A Sleep of Prisoners
"Dark and cold we may be,
but this is no winter now.
The frozen misery of centuries breaks, cracks begins to move.
The thunder is the thunder of the floes,
the thaw, the flood, the upstart spring.
Thank God our time is now
when wrong comes up to face us everywhere
never to leave us till we take
the longest stride of soul man ever took."
Why these September 11th events are so different from all other previous crises that have also exposed anomalies in the system, is that this crisis went right to the very jugular of western society; it has highlighted certain wrongs so forcefully that we can no longer avoid seeing them.
Facing the Shadow
For many people, the new realisation is dawning that the enemy does not just exist "out there"; the enemy is also within us. And we see the enemy out there precisely so that we can become more aware of him within ourselves. In other words, we are the enemy; the Terrorist is us. In "Faces of the Enemy", Sam Keen suggests that if we want a better, more peaceful world it is no good simply focusing on the positive, or conversely just trying to bash the external foe. This disregards the psychology of homo hostis, that part in each of us that is violent, fanatical and hostile, which the more it is suppressed, the more it spills out into our world in destructive ways and so continually maintains a mindset of hostility. For Keen, if there is to be peace, we have to address the shadow of the Terrorist within our own hearts.
As a psychotherapist, I have always maintained that the "real spiritual work" today is the work with our own shadow or dark side. A large part of what I do is helping my clients discover this part of themselves, find out how their inner saboteurs manifest and what they need to do to reclaim and integrate them within themselves. In Jung's words: "we don't become enlightened by sitting in the light but by going into our darkness ..." Any part of ourselves that we do not "own" (that is, exclude from our field of awareness) "becomes the enemy."
Jung invented the term shadow to refer to the "other side" of our nature, our "inferior side", the part of us of which we are ordinarily not conscious. My shadow is what I do not see about myself, and would find disgusting and unacceptable if I could. Consequently, I tend only to discover it by seeing what I dislike about and so project onto other people, or what I hate out in the world. This work of reclaiming our shadows is spiritual work because our true nature or our spiritual essence - that is, where our true humanity and power and love lie - is primarily to be discovered in these dark crevices. I never cease being astonished - when a client comes to accept some hitherto quite unacceptable part of themselves - at how profoundly their authentic self emerges and how much their consciousness begins to expand.
Looking Within
What is needed on our planet, and what I see beginning to emerge, phoenix-like out of the dawn of all this violence and chaos around us, is a new expanding consciousness, and the trigger for this was the terrorist attack. Indeed, unbeknown to them, the terrorists have in fact been agents of planetary awakening.
To understand this, we need to know something of the great mystery of evil and how it is inextricably interwoven with the evolutionary unfurling of things. As someone once put it "The devil seems to be God's greatest ally!" Mephistopheles acknowledged this when he said to Faust: "I am forever evil who does forever good", which might well be Osama Bin Laden's epitaph! Simply put, the prime initiator of goodness and soul may often be totally horrendous and soulless circumstances. Certainly, in America, the wake up call has been heard. By having been stabbed so deeply in her heart, something has opened widely there and as a nation she is having to ask profound questions, perhaps for the first time, about her motivations. Above all, she is needing to confront the dark side of her "American dream", to see what she has sacrificed along the journey to "the good life", to see why there is so much violence and addiction in her society (the addict is a kind of self-terrorist) and what has happened that has made her become so spiritually bankrupt and distant from the soulful vision of her founding fathers. America is also having to look at why her policies, which have often favoured re- arranging the world map to suit her own strategic interests, have made her so hated.
In a similar way, Islam is also having to look deeply at itself and see why so many Muslims exist in poverty, ruled by barbaric dictators. lzzat Majeed, a Palestinian writer, suggested that "we Muslims cannot keep blaming the West for all our ills. We have failed as a society by not confronting the historical, social and political demons within us. Without a reformation in the practice of Islam that makes it move forward instead of backwards, there is no hope for Muslims anywhere."
Reconciliation
The demons of both western culture and Islam are now out in the open. This means that they can now be confronted and seen for what they are. The West and Islam also need to realise that both are each other's shadow and therefore are convenient hooks on which to hang their respective grievances. Thus, it is much easier for the West to bomb the Muslims in revenge than really look at the violence within their own society. It is possible that once these kinds of issues come into the light and are debated, that the politics of blame and scapegoating may end, and people will come to recognise that opposites need not always be in conflict.
What needs to be found is that magical, sacred space where reconciliation can take place. Paradoxically, both the West and the Muslim nations contain the necessary antidotes which could help this to come about and which, if appropriated, would allow for greater wholeness on both sides. For example, there is a deep spirituality and devotionality in Islam, which is sorely missing and deeply needed in the West. We Westerners, on the other hand, have created important structures of democratic freedom, which need somehow to be more appropriated by the Islamic cultures if these very noble people are to move into the 21st Century. Perhaps this convergence will be speeded up to the extent that both sides face another significant common enemy in their midst, namely Fundamentalism. Whether the Fundamentalist is a Christian or a Muslim makes very little difference, as essentially it is a bankrupt theology of blinkered, closed-hearted, shadow-denying fanaticism, and is always destructive to the spirit of freedom.
The Fundamentalist mindset always believes the evil is outside himself: it must be attacked and wiped out. It is a theology predicated upon either needing Satans to hate or Infidels to butcher. This is pathological thinking. Evil never dies through being attacked. It dies through light being shed on its nature. It dies as a result of being seen for what it is, resulting in people no longer choosing to engage in the kind of activities that keep it alive. The more the spirit of wholeness and goodness predominates, the more evil becomes starved of its life blood. Evil is only allowed to predominate, as Edmund Burke suggested, so long as good people do nothing! The best teaching on evil comes from Hildegard of Bingen; "Don't curse the darkness," she said, "But light a light."
Our Personal Challenges
So: what are our personal challenges here? How can we be agents in this new awakening?
Firstly, we need to be aware that we are the instruments through which evolution unfolds and that today we are all facing a "dangerous opportunity", and as such, need to stay strong and centred as we realise that it is no longer up to others to implement change. Rather, we must realise that it is our responsibility to stand up and be counted and to play our part in this new emergence no matter what our field of expertise. Each of us has his or her own little chunk of shadow work to do, our own little piece of the great transformational mystery to puzzle out, and the more we choose uncompromisingly to take stands for what we believe needs to happen, the more we play our part in diminishing the weight of the great world shadow, and in so doing we allow space for the spiritual light to emerge out of its obscurity.
It may well be that in the years ahead we will face similar dark shadows, that things become even darker just before the dawn. Perhaps a lot more emptying and purging is still required, and if so, it may well be that, as a species, we will enter still more deeply into what in spiritual literature, is known as the Dark Night of the Soul experience.
If this is the case, we should not fear this, but rather remember that the more we confront our hidden terrors, fears, prejudices, hatreds and resentments, the more we can incinerate them and in so doing discover our deeper humanity lying at their core.
These times will only be difficult if we insist on looking back to our past and not forward to our future, if we still choose to go on living from a place of viewing life solely through the lens of our ego self, which divides the world into good and bad, with bad being everything that does not go the way we want! If, through the conscious facing of our dark side, our soul life begins to grow, then we will be able to appreciate the vaster transitions that we are all living through, and will be able to feel honoured and privileged to be living in these most creative and exciting times.
However, in order to play an effective part in this great evolutionary adventure, we need to put our own spiritual house in order, we need to do our own "spiritual homework" to heal and strengthen ourselves. There is much fear around now, and while we need to be able to recognise it, we must not get caught up with it. Jesus always advised his disciples to not let their hearts be troubled as he realised that troubled hearts led to ineffectiveness.
We cannot afford to be ineffective today and a great deal of what I call "heart work" is therefore also needed on our part to both empty our hearts of their fears and traumas as we also work to deepen and enlarge our hearts. Teilhard de Chardin saw the human heart as humanity's great secret weapon and suggested that, when awakened, it contained more power than the atomic bomb.
The more we learn to harness our heart power and utilise the great weapons of love, courage, compassion and prayerfulness that lie inside it, the more effectively we will be able to face our demons, be they at a personal, national, religious, human- collective or global level. Having a strong heart will not only give us the ability to journey deeper into our shadows at an internal level but will also give us the spiritual protection and courage to enter pockets of darkness and evil out in the world as healing and reconciliatory agents.
Dr. Serge Beddington-Behrens is a psychotherapist in private practice. He runs workshops and retreats on spiritual themes and is completing a book on the relationship between psychotherapy and the spiritual path.