"Shadow Dancing" (long) (no spoilers) Interesting References
Dan Dassow
On a lark, I did a web search on "Shadow Dancing." As I expected, I
found quite a few references to BABYLON 5, however, I also I came across
some interest information on Jungian psychology that may well be the key
to the Shadows in BABYLON 5, as others have speculated previously. If
nothing else, some of what I read sent chills down my spine.
I have NOT SEEN "Shadow Dancing." I won't see it till Thursday,
24-October-1996, so please do not send me any spoilers. That also means
that "Z'ha'dum" will be shown on Halloween in St. Louis -- spooky.
The first URL points to some interesting pictures of shadows cast upon
cave walls.
http://www.uspan.com/art/studio/glenda/glenda2.html
The remaining references are self explanatory.
Dan Dassow
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http://www.vix.com/pub/menmag/shadowda.html
SHADOW DANCING
Roger Easterbrooks
"The SHADOW is the whole unconscious.... How can I be substantial
without casting a shadow? I must have a dark side too, if I am to
be whole, and my becoming conscious of my shadow, I remember once
more that I am a human being like any other."
Carl Jung
What lives in your unconscious -- as a wound, as a feeling, as a thought, or
as a desire -- can be acted out without your knowledge. This creates a
distorted perception of your internal and/or external experience. A SHADOW
DANCE mirrors you what lives in your unconscious, what you haven't into
awareness, so that you can move in your life with more clarity.
"One does not become whole by imaging figures of light but the
darkness conscious."
Carl Jung
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http://www.mca.com/putnam/books/meeting_the_shadow/toc.html
Table of Contents for
Meeting the Shadow
The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human
Nature
[Image] Edited by Connie Zweig , and Jeremiah Abrams
A Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam Book
ISBN: 0-87477-618-X
$14.95 ($19.95 Can)
Connie Zweig
Prologue
Jeremiah Abrams and Connie Zweig
Introduction: The Shadow Side of Everyday Life
Part I: What Is the Shadow?
Introduction
1. Robert Bly
The Long Bag We Drag Behind Us
2. Edward C. Whitmont
The Evolution of the Shadow
3. D. Patrick Miller
What the Shadow Knows:
An Interview with John A. Sanford
4. Anthony Stevens
The Shadow in History and Literature
5. John A. Sanford
Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde
6. Marie-Louise von Franz
The Realization of the Shadow in Dreams
7. William A. Miller
Finding the Shadow in Daily Life
Part 2: Shadow Making: Forming the Disowned Self in the Family
Introduction
8. Harville Hendrix
Creating the False Self
9. Robert M. Stein
Rejection and Betrayal
10. Kim Chernin
The Underside of the Mother-Daughter Relationship
11. John A. Sanford
Parenting and Your Child's Shadow
Part 3: Shadow Boxing: The Dance of Envy, Anger, and Deceit
Introduction
12. Christine Downing
Sisters and Brothers Casting Shadows
13. Daryl Sharp
My brother/Myself
14. Maggie Scarf
Meeting Our Opposites in Husbands and Wives
15. Michael Ventura
Shadow Dancing in the Marriage Zone
Part 4: The Disowned Body: Illness, Health, and Sexuality
Introduction
16. John P. Conger
The Body as Shadow
17. John C. Pierrakos
Anatomy of Evil
18. Larry Dossey
The Light of Health, The Shadow of Illness
19. Alfred J. Zeigler
Illness as Descent into the Body
20. Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig
The Demonic Side of Sexuality
Part 5: The Shadow of Achievement: The Dark Side of Work and Progress
21. Bruce Shackleton
Meeting the Shadow at Work
22. John R. O'Neill
The Dark Side of Success
23. Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig
Quacks, Charlatans, and False Prophets
24. Marsha Sinetar
Using Our Flaws and Faults
25. Chellis Clendinning
When Technology Wounds
26. Peter Bishop
Wilderness as a Victim of Progress
Part 6: Meeting Darkness on the Path: The Hidden Sides of Religion and=
Spirituality
Introduction
27. Brother David Steindl-Rast
The Shadow in Christianity
28. William Carl Eichman
Meeting the Dark Side in Spiritual Practice
29. Katy Butler
Encountering the Shadow in Buddhist America
30. George Feuerstein
The Shadow of the Enlightened Guru
31. W. Brugh Joy
A Heretic in a New Age Community
32. Liz Greene
The Shadow in Astrology
33. Sallie Nichold
The Devil in the Tarot
34. John Babbs
New Age Fundamentalism
Part 7: Devils, Demons, and Scapegoats: A Psychology of Evil
Introduction
35. C.G. Jung
The Problem with Evil Today
36. Rollo May
The Dangers of Innocence
37. M. Scott Peck
Healing Human Evil
38. Stephen A. Diamond
Redeeming Our Devils and Demons
39. Ernest Becker
The Basic Dynamic of Human Evil
40. Andrew Bard Schmookler
Acknowledging Our Inner Split
Part 8: Enemy-Making: Us and Them in the Body Politic
Introduction
41. Sam Keen
The enemy Maker
42. Fran Peavey (with Myrna Levy and Charles Varon)
Us and Them
43. Susan Griffin
The Chauvinist Mind
44. Audre Lorde
America's Outsiders
45. Jeome S. Bernstein
The U.S.-Soviet Mirror
46. Robert Jay Lifton
Doubling and the Nazi Doctors
47. Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig
Why Psychopaths Do Not Rule the World
48. Jerry Fjerkenstad
Who Are the Criminals?
49. James Yandell
Devils on the Freeway
Part 9: Shadow Work: Bringing Light to the Darkness
Through Therapy, Story, and Dreams
Introduction
50. James Hillman
The Cure of the Shadow
51. Sheldon B. Kopp
Tale of a Descent into Hell
52. Joseph Campbell
The Belly of the Whale
53. Gary Toub
The Usefulness of the Useless
54. Karen Signell
Working with Women's Dreams
55. Janice Brewi and Anne Brennan
Emergence of the Shadow in Midlife
56. Daniel J. Levinson
For the Man at Midlife
57. Liliane Frey-Rohn
How to Deal with Evil
Part 10: Owning Your Dark Side Through Insight, Art, and Ritual
58. Ken Wilber
Taking Responsibility for Your Shadow
59. Robert Bly
Eating the Shadow
60. Nathaniel Branden
Taking Back the Disowned Self
61. Hal Stone with Sidra Winkelman
Dialogue with the Demonic Self
62. John Bradshaw
Taming the Shameful Inner Voice
63. Barbara Hannah
Learning Active Imagination
64. Linda Jacobson
Drawing the Shadow
65. Deena Metzger
Writing About the Other
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http://www.lightworks.com/MonthlyAspectarian/1996/June/09-0696.html
I'd say my exploration with Anna was to really understand dancing with the
shadow, dancing with the dark side of the self. In those first couple of
years I realized that I had to unlearn what I had learned about movement;
especially all the patterning of movement of modern dance, which is one
level. It's beautiful for observers, but I think it creates a cost to the
dancer; we train our bodies so thoroughly to become a certain personae that
we rule out a lot of our inner life.
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http://www.geol.vt.edu/uu/sermon960317.html
Dancing with the Shadow
A sermon delivered by Rev. Rudi Gelsey, minister, March 17, 1996, at the
Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the New River Valley
When we look at issues in our lives, we often focus on outward factors: the
country in which we live; the time in history when we grew up: the Great
Depression, World War 2, the Vietnam era. What is our family history: Did we
have an alcoholic parent, a nurturing grandmother? How about our school or
college experiences? What kind of an atmosphere do we work in?
Amid this complex web of circumstances, we tend to present ourselves to the
world with those strands that make us appear in the most favorable light,
while suppressing shades of darkness. We push the less glorious aspects of
our personality underground, lock them up in the deep recesses of our being,
and throw the key away.
Trouble is that when banned from the light of consciousness, our baser parts
may come back with a vengeance. More and more effort is required to keep
matters smooth, while our wounding secretly festers. There is always the
danger of becoming, as Scott Peck put it "People of the Lie", victims of our
own unacknowledged shadow. Too many people lead a double life, outwardly
under control, inwardly churning.
When our lives start running into trouble - and I don't know of anyone who
at one point or another, does not find himself or herself in that situation
- one defense mechanism is to look for excuses, scapegoats, circumstances or
people we can blame for our misfortunes. It is the fault of our parents, our
spouse, racial discrimination, you name it.
No question, such circumstances figure in the matrix of our lives, yet we
also need to look inward, ward off the temptation of self-deception.
Take an extreme case, Al Capone, the archetype of a Mafioso. At the end of
his career, he reportedly said "My life's goal was to help people."
Contrast this with Wolfgang Goethe, the universally respected German
classicist and statesman, confessing "There is no crime, however abject,
that I might not have been capable of perpetrating."
Goethe, looking inward, saw his shadow, and was able to cope with it. 101
years after Goethe's death, Hitler came to power. Like Al Capone, Hitler had
an idealized self-image. He was going to save Germany from the iniquities of
the Versailles Treaty and create a magnificent Reich lasting a millennium.
Hitler denying his shadow, left behind a trail of destruction and crime.
Besides the grand scale of world history, one of the very caring people in
our congregation, recently told me that as a child, she tortured an animal,
which helped her gain the insight, like Goethe, that she was capable not
only of evil phantasies but of vile misdeeds.
With an assist from depth psychology, religion at its best, helps us to look
inward, to recognize our imperfections and not project them upon others.
Religion, in its immature form, focuses on the antagonist or the infidel out
there, rather than the doubts and demons within.
Today, in this country, when fundamentalists fulminate against religious
liberals, it may be because ambiguity and the shadow are unsettling to true
believers. Fundies, as a friend of mine calls them, adhere strictly to the
letter of book and law, in the desperate hope it will guarantee their
salvation.
The shadow, a term coined by psychotherapist Carl Jung, is that part in us
we repress and reject, burying it deep in our psyche, then projecting it on
someone else or a group that becomes the "identified problem."
How about us? Is there also such a thing as a Unitarian Universalist shadow?
Since our Unitarian and Universalist histories are different, let us look at
them separately.
Universalists have abjured Hell, and what is Hell if not the shadow of
Heaven? Universalists, like Buddhists, want all people to be well and happy,
now and forevermore, a virtual impossibility, so our waves of idealism break
upon the rocks of reality.
We find it difficult to cope with evil, with conflict. As proponents of love
and light, we are hard put to understand atrocities like genocide or on a
smaller scale, this week's horrible massacre of some fourteen innocent
children in Scotland.
In this country, our antagonists have their favorite whipping boys,
liberals, welfare cheats, gays and lesbians, Blacks, illegal immigrants, to
name a few.
Coming to think of it: Don't we have a parallel list of scapegoats
ourselves: the fundamentalists, Jesse Helms and Phyllis Schlaffly, the gun
lobby, polluters, racists, sexists. There are lots of people we love to
hate. I have uttered the taboo word: Hate. Aren't we supposed to love. Well,
we have an elegant way out: we don't really hate. We only do it in the name
of love, just as, in the name of tolerance, we are intolerant of
intolerance.
The trouble with this paradox is that our opponents use the very same
argument. During the Inquisition and the witch-hunts, for instance, the
avowed purpose was to save the eternal soul of misguided unbelievers and
victims of Satan. Nowadays, in the name of saving unborn babies, women are
supposed to bear children of rape and incest.
So here is a chastening insight. What we reject in others, in a different
form, is found in us. May I suggest: In lieu of being self-righteous, our
religious task is to develop a sense of compassion, compassion toward our
own shadow, and the shadow of others. Perhaps, instead of fighting the
shadow, we might want to dance with it, establish a rapport where we are
neither overwhelmed by the shadow, nor seek to eradicate it. The metaphor of
the shadow as a dancing partner also seems appropriate, because our shadow
is full of energy, imagination, creativity.
In Greek mythology we have Hermes, whose character encompassed both the
sublime and the shadow. While Hermes was a messenger of the Gods, he was
also a trickster who could cheat and steal with panache.
Let us now look at the shadow issue from a Unitarian perspective. Is there
such a thing as a Unitarian shadow or blind spot?
Unitarians have a dual historical allegiance. Some, like founder William
Ellery Channing, made reason into their guiding light, so that feelings and
emotionalism were relegated to a shadowy existence. Religion was to be
reasonable, manageable, not at the mercy of emotional outbursts, like the
Revivalists and the Holy Rollers, or today's televangelists.
Other Unitarians, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker, were
mystical and soulful Transcendentalists in touch with tragedy, engaged in a
valiant struggle with the preeminent shadow of American society in those
days: slavery.
When I entered theological school in 1959, the rational side of the
Unitarian way in religion was in the saddle, while now the cutting edge is
spirituality, a religion of the heart. We are rediscovering music, poetry,
meditation, even ritual.
Take, for instance, our practice of lighting the chalice. Obviously, in
broad daylight, such a ritual makes little sense, yet at some level it
speaks to our hunger for the sacred and reverence for life. And it is better
to light a candle, is it not? than to project or curse the shadow.
We stand at the crossroads. It is time to end our exclusive emphasis on
reason, our denial of feelings.
It is time to end our denial of hell, which is a way of denying evil. The
direction of our religious quest is not perfection but wholeness. While
perfection forever eludes, wholeness accepts and integrates shadow and
light.
Compassion toward our own and other peoples shortcomings is the bridge over
troubled waters, the link between the shadow we humbly acknowledge and the
light we wish to radiate.
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http://www.vt.com/~extreme/extreme/xda4/xda4text.html
shadow boxing
last round
looks like i'm in for a fight
knocked down
there is nowhere left to hide
stick 'n' move
when i try to run away
old one two
i only end up face to face
mirror mirror getting clearer
it's just me and my shadow
dancing round the ring
i try to fight it
but then how can i win
when i'm only shadow boxing
time out
i'm looking for a
standing eight
no doubt
my inside has come out to play
bob 'n' weave
it's conscious of my
every move
been deceived
can no longer ignore the truth
mirror mirror getting clearer
split decision blur my vision