RE: slaying shadows within the collective unconscious rather than personal shadows, I will say that after I had done a substantial amount of personal shadow work over a 14 year period, I then started tackling a lot of collective shadows to better understand them, and from that I learned even more about myself, and found more personal shadows. My collective shadow slaying (integration) lasted another 8 years or so. I did this by reading news articles, Facebook posts, and other polarizing content, especially in relation to ideological agendas and political propaganda, allowed myself to feel emotionally triggered by them, and then asked myself questions about what the pattern would look like in an interpersonal relationship. From there, I’d experience the pattern by playing one of the two sides, with somebody I knew, loved, or randomly bumped into playing the other role, and I’d observe myself and them throughout the process. This is a form of dialectical thinking (and experiencing) that I could somewhat control in a microcosmic set of events, since we don’t have much power or control in the macrocosmic plane/sphere of existence, where the problem (thesis) would come in, I’d react to it (anti-thesis), and rather than rushing to conform to a side (conscious/light vs unconscious/dark), or try to get the other party to conform to a side by forcing my views on them, I’d sit with the tension of opposites until a third pathway would manifest in the form of an epiphany, insight, and new higher understanding that brought order to the chaos (synthesis). I called this process “Gandhi Groups” because I was attempting to “be the change I wanted to see in the world” through letting myself witness and observe the things I didn’t like in the world in order to find them in my own personal experiences, to transform their patterns in a very personal manner. Jung touched on this in the following quote:
If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow. Such a man has saddled himself with new problems and conflicts. He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now unable to say that they do this or that, they are wrong, and they must be fought against… Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day.
~“Psychology and Religion” (1938). In CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East. P.140
I learned quite a lot about myself, philosophy, critical thinking, psychology, ideologies, underlying assumptions, and law as a result of living this process.
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