UNSHADOWED

Turning the "Omni-Crisis" into Healing

This week has seen a massive acceleration in world events. It’s particularly surreal to witness the systems of civilization and the last vestiges of economic, social and geopolitical stability being finally fully dismantled before our eyes to make way for a new system. It is abundantly clear that there are no political solutions, and that neither strongman nor tech magnate can save us.

But it’s not just a man-made “poly-crisis.” When one throws in grand solar cycles, pole excursion, a weakening magnetosphere, the possibility of a solar micronova, the irreversible sabotage being done to the human genome—just to name a few!—we see that humanity is really facing an “omni-crisis.” It’s like every red light is flashing in the cockpit of human awareness. To address this omni-crisis by encouraging steps we can take in reality (“So grow those gardens!”) is to understate the severity of the situation.

In deeply studying outward reality, it seems, there are no solutions for the problems humanity faces.

What is the individual to do? Many people have reached this point in awareness and, exhausted (or perhaps too scared to turn inward), given up on the whole absurd reality. This state of defeat is so common that it has acquired the colloquial name, black pilled.

Black Pill Antidote

Psychologist Carl Jung offers a different lens. Jung held that our experience in outward reality is a reflection of our own inner psychic processes:

What we do not make conscious will manifest in our lives as fate.

What does this mean? As an example, someone who grew up in a household where mistakes were harshly punished may develop an unconscious fear of failure. As an adult, instead of confronting this fear directly, they procrastinate or otherwise sabotage their own progress. This invites failures, repeating the trauma, as if the outer world is presenting a new opportunity to deal with the psychic wound, begging for integration. The cycle continues, often escalating, until (unless) this individual becomes aware of the deep-seated trauma, and consciously works to heal it.

Until then, the person, unwilling to face these fears and behaviors, pushes them into the dark areas of the psyche: the shadow.

Healing begins when the individual brings those buried fears into awareness and works to integrate the shadow (rather than repressing or “other-ing” it), allowing them to move beyond these fate-driven cycles and regain personal agency.

I’ll call this healing process “doing the work,” and it takes different forms for different individuals and situations.

My description is woefully inadequate, and the shadow deserves a much better look, but we must move on.

Beyond the Individual

The idea of the shadow extends beyond the individual. Many kinds of trauma (anger or abusive behavior, addictions, financial insecurity, emotional repression) are passed from one generation to the next, again until (unless) someone in the lineage becomes aware of the shadow, and consciously does the work to stop the unconscious pattern, breaking the cycle before it imprints onto the next generation.

And just as this happens within a family, so too can it happen within all of humanity. At this level, which Jung called the collective consciousness, the shadow represents all the human behaviors which individuals don’t want or judge as “evil”, and push away from themselves. Things like tyrannical government, child trafficking, war, a poisoned food supply, … — the very problems facing us, of which we are collectively becoming increasingly aware. These are our collective shadow.

In this sense, the “alternative media” is doing the critically important work of bringing awareness back to the collective shadow. As with an individual, these things which have been judged as evil and repressed are now surfacing — quite violently so at the moment — to repeat the trauma. This gives us the opportunity to do the work collectively, and begin the healing.

But what does that look like? How does an individual integrate a collective shadow?

How do we respond to the omni-crisis?

Fighting is not Integrating

To reach out in frustration at outward reality, and to try to change things there, is not doing the work. In Jung’s words:

"What you resist, persists.”

This is just as true when you scale this out to the collective consciousness level. As Phillip K. Dick put it:

"To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. This is a paradox; whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies."

In other words, efforts to fight the system will actually only empower it. Only through doing the inner work of confronting our shadows can we act without feeding the cycle. Healing, not opposition, guides us to true solutions. I am not at all suggesting outward efforts are not worthwhile—Grow the gardens! Develop decentralized communities and technologies! Spread the word!—but that efforts must be informed by clarity and healing, rather than an exodus from or attack on the old system.

The bottom line is this: collective integration, or how we actually survive the omni-crisis and prosper as a species, means as many of us as possible doing the work.

This is the subject of UNSHADOWED.

The mass awakening is evolving. Our exponentially growing awareness of the current omni-crisis and the centuries-long darkness that has plagued humanity is the collective shadow coming to the surface so that we can become conscious of it and, ultimately, integrate it. The more of us that do the work, the more ripples will be in the collective psyche of humanity, and the better our experience will be. (In my next post, I’ll talk more about what that might look like — and it gets even more fun. Stick around!)

On a personal note, writing on this topic is part of my own healing process. To continue pointing at facets of the omni-crisis without exploring a real solution may be easier, more popular, more profitable, and (best of all!) I wouldn’t have to look at my own shadow. My goal, however, is to be truly impactful in our collective healing. I don’t know at all where the journey will take me, but I absolutely invite you to join me!

Conclusion

The omni-crisis is a tremendous opportunity for us to become aware of the true nature of the psyche, and reality as a reflection thereof. Collectively, we do determine what happens in reality¹.

This will not be a popular message — the nature of our shadow, after all, is that we don’t want to look at it! — it requires stopping the adrenaline-fueled response to the madness escalating daily in the world, and doing deep work on one’s self. But it is work worth doing. And, it seems, the only lever we have to heal our collective experience is to heal ourselves.

Carl Jung suggested humanity was on the precipice of this:

(It’s worth watching Jung himself (above), but for those reading without audio):

One thing is sure. A great change of our psychological attitude is imminent. Because we need more psychology; we need more understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself. He is the great danger. And we are pitifully unaware of it. We know far too little. His psyche should be studied, because we are the origin of all coming evil.

The imminent change he foresaw is now here, and a better future can begin.

But we’ll have to do the work.

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1. This is not an Oprah “Secret” manifestation technique, but rather a very real interplay between our collective psyche and the reality we experience. See Paul Levy’s “Dispelling Wetiko” or even think of Lescaudron/Knight-Jadczyk’s “Earth Changes and the Human-Cosmic Connection”.