INNER GAME OF LOVE Copyright 2014, Kevin Zucker

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Loves Shadow


arl Jung advises us not to be content with the daylight side of
things but to look beyond; not to be satisfied with appearances
which stand out in the bright sunlit world, but also to attend to
dreams, visions and fantasies that do not show up in the light of day. Jung
advises that each thing, each idea, each emotion, and each of us has a
shadow side. Unacceptable feelings that we deny in ourselvesprimitive
emotions like the lust for power, dominance, selfishness, and greedend
up in the shadow. Once there, these impulses become unconscious and
their continued denial usually requires that they be projected onto others,
as though we could throw them at someone else and they would stick. This
is the purpose of the scapegoatone person who has to carry the blame for
all the darkness in a family or a community. The longer we remain
unconscious of this tendency, values gradually become inverted, until our
lives have become the exact opposite of what we have striven for. In the
process of denial, the shadow becomes downright evil.
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In the Buddhist teachings, the messy emotional stuff is called klesha,
which means poison. There are three main poisons: passion, aggression,
and ignorance. We could talk about these in different waysfor example,
we could also call them craving, aversion, and couldnt care less.
Addictions of all kinds come under the category of craving, which is
wanting, wanting, wantingfeeling that we have to have some kind of
resolution. Aversion encompasses violence, rage, hatred, and negativity of
all kinds, as well as garden-variety irritation. And ignorance? Nowadays,
its usually called denial.
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Nothing can exist in our world in the form of pure light. Even though
we may catch a glimpse of the other world from time to time, in our earth-
bound life we can understand that there is no purity, no perfection. We will
be better off accepting our lives as they are here and now and having some
compassion for ourselves as imperfect Humanity.
Perfection, if it existed, would be exceedingly dull, a blank slate.
Without shadow, without darkness, we would not know that light was light.
Without shadow, the artist would have nothing to paint with, and no
images could stand forth. Human life is comprised of both light and
shadow, the play of good and evil. Evil cannot be eradicated; in fact, the
more we fight against it, the more it becomes a part of us. Ultimately the
best way to deal with it is to just move on with our lives and leave it behind.
he shadow form of Love is Egoic Love. The ego gets very high
when it gets what it wants.
The ego always wants something from other people or situations ... and
even when it succeeds, it is never satisfied for long. ... The underlying emotion
that governs all the activity of the ego is fear. The fear of being nobody, the fear
of nonexistence, the fear of death. All its activities are ultimately designed to
eliminate this fear, but the most the ego can ever do is to cover it up temporarily
with an intimate relationship, a new possession, or winning at this or that.
Illusion will never satisfy you. Only the truth of who you are, if realized, will set

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Pema Chdrn, Comfortable with Uncertainty, p. 105.
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you free.
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Even if you have tasted Transcendent Love you may not be able to fully
escape the orbit of Egoic Love. Life becomes a constant process of losing
mindfulness and then regaining it again.
Love, love, loveall the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust,
masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-
induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in
the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire,
the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.
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goic Love follows the sequence of the Kleshas, moving from desire, to
aversion, to indifference. You may have found yourself in a relationship
with someone who has stars in their eyes. Though you know better, you
don't want to talk them out of it. Its great for the ego, but your sense of
frustration will increase as your partner gradually begins to re-imagine you in a
negative light. The more unrealistic their initial concept, the more exaggerated
will be their reaction as the scales begin to fall from their eyes. This usually
happens at about the two-to-three-year mark. After that it becomes impossible
to sustain the enchantment, and a power struggle ensuesa struggle for
dominance and control. The majority of relationships end at this time. That is
because the Ego is no longer getting fedjust fed up. Arguments become
frequent, and in the bedroom the power struggle takes on erotic overtones.
Then it is just a step to domestic violence.
Unless and until you access the consciousness frequency of presence,
relationships, and particularly intimate relationships, are deeply flawed and
ultimately dysfunctional. They may seem perfect for a while, such as when you
are "in love," but invariably that apparent perfection gets disrupted as
arguments, conflicts, dissatisfaction, and emotional or even physical violence
occur with increasing frequency.
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2
Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, p. 80
3
Germaine Greer
4
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
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I was sitting with a friend, many years ago, in Cafe Figaro, a coffee house in
Greenwich Village, and we overheard a woman say, He beats me, but I love
him.
My friend, an amusing cynical man, remarked, You can either be a bastard
or a chump. In other words, Love is a power struggle, and you better win,
using force if necessary. If you try to be a sensitive guy, you will ultimately lose.
It is easy to sympathize with that woman as a pathetic victim who doesnt
know better, and very easy to condemn my friends machismo, but this is to
show how deceptively simple things appear from a rational perspective. Our
daylight world wants to see this womans courage to break the bonds of the
relationship and enter into therapy, most likely for years, with little chance of
achieving any actual healing. Despite our deeply-held morality and our sense of
good and evil, such relationships will always be a part of the landscape. The
point is to try and understand why: what is gained and what is lost.
One common mistake which prevents any understanding is the assumption
that each person is like any other and we all know what it means to be Human
that there is a right way to be. Those who fail to do the right thing deserve our
sympathy but perhaps not our respect. Underneath this sympathy is a
judgmental voice that compares my well-adjusted life with her messed-up life.
But my life, though entirely well-regulated, may be mostly devoid of joy; while
the messy life may have been a journey through the greatest heights of ecstasy
to utter desolation.
round my fiftieth year I finally realized that each person understands
what it means to be Human in a different way. Until then I thought I had
all the answers while everyone else was cluelessthen I first took the
Vervain Flower Remedy, for patients whom Dr. Bach describes as:
Those with fixed principles and ideas, which they are confident are right, and
which they very rarely change. They have a great wish to convert all around them
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to their own views of life. They are strong of will and have much courage when
they are convinced of those things that they wish to teach.
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For some of those brave ones, the play of love and sex is a natural setting to
express instinctive drives. The bedroom is a private place to explore the
primitive emotions without inhibition, where the lust for power can be an
aphrodisiac and the feeling of dominance or submission is not regarded as a
character flaw; where being demanding or greedy can be a turn-on, and
selfishness is a sure path to ecstasy.
I once loved a woman who liked a man to take-charge. My feeling, sadly
mis-proved, was that a greater Love would bring her beyond that stage, and she
drifted away to a more suitable lover, who did the things that she wanted and I
was too reserved for. This experience taught me not to try to bring my own
daylight values into the bedroom, where all the masks come down and
everything is negotiable. Standards of right and wrong no longer apply, or are
variable, and wherever we draw the line, transgressing it can heighten the erotic
energy.
Wilhelm Reich believed that the ability to love depended on the loss of ego
that came along with sex. This play becomes dangerous when we have to travel
to greater and greater depths to achieve ecstasy, or when those transgressions
begin to emerge from the bedroom. In a recent case, a man had taken to setting
(vacant) houses on fire in the belief that his lover found the fires erotic.
he shadow world is not really to be despised. Our work is to incor-
porate our shadow material back into the stream of life and to work
with it. In that way we achieve a state of wholeness. Until this is
accomplished, we are always doomed to half-measures, mistaken opinions
and unintended consequences. The ego is in full resistance to any
acknowledgement of the shadowthe project of incorporating the shadow
is a great threat to the ego.

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Dr. Edward Bach, The Twelve Healers and Other Remedies

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