by Marc Gafni
Carl Gustav Jung offered a profound direction in understanding shadow. His core teaching, drawn from many sources, is that we cannot be whole human beings without recognizing and incorporating our shadow energy. Jung has an expression that he uses constantly to express this idea: “In the Shadow is the Gold.” By this, he means to say that most of what is valuable in the human personality””the gold””can be mined only from the shadow. But what does that mean, and why should it be so? It is to this all-important question that we now turn our attention. We will seek to fundamentally evolve what shadow means and how shadow work is done! At this point, I am going to unpack directly from the original tantric sources a radical new teaching on shadow integration.
So let us begin. In the book of Genesis, one of the oldest texts of Unique Self teachings, the creation myth is expressed in the words, “God said, Let there be Light. And there was light.”
Light, with its unique frequency for every person, is””as we have already noted””one of the primary mystical symbols for Unique Self. In the third-century mystical esoteric texts on Genesis, it is taught that this original light that initiated the creative process was too much for the world to bear, so “God hid the original light. The light will be revealed to the righteous in the world of becoming.” In a similar way, contemporary neuroscience suggests that we deploy only a fraction of our mind’s potential for consciousness.
Some centuries later, the Zohar picks up the thread of the earlier teaching. “Where was the original light of creation hidden?” ask the masters. To which the masters respond, “The original light was hidden in the darkness!” “Where does the original light still appear in the world?” ask the masters once more. “In the person of the enlightened ones,” responds the text. And who are the enlightened ones? The enlightened ones, the righteous ones, according to the masters of Tantric Kabbalah, are the ones who have incarnated their Unique Self. The implication of the text is this: to realize your Unique Self, you must follow the path of the light hidden in the darkness.
From: Your Unique Self