More on the shadow and maturity

Another thing about growing up - it's coming to accept that the rest of the world might know more than you, that the people you meet and the things that you read might have something to teach you. Not necessarily all of them, but you could treat it as a possibility.

I am on the edge of this myself. I am only just recognising that all the stuff that's ever been written could be useful. That dead people could have something to teach me and that I should at least be open to it. The immature, adolescent position is "Fuck this shit, you guys know nothing, just look at the mess you've made of the world!" I mean at the time I was hitting adolescence there was a very real risk of a final nuclear catastrophe. We seemed to have cooled off somewhat for a while but it's hotting up again. We've still got the weapons. And so I woke up as a teenager facing this and asking "This is the world you're going to pass on to me? Nope, not having that, we're going to have to start from scratch, and I'm smart, you keep telling me that too, so I'm just going to have to go back to basics and work it out all over."

And then twenty-five years later or so, having tried that and banged my head against reality good and hard, I let the smallest sliver of light in and it's been growing ever since.

It took a bit of a leap forward in the last year or so when I came to see that although I'd messed up frequently, I was largely forgiven by others and if I could also forgive myself for my mistakes, things could get a lot better, quite quickly. Anyway, that's why I'm reading and writing about psychological interpretations of stories and symbols and myths and reflecting on my own knowledge and exposure to the beautiful stories of the Bible before I got too cocky and Dawkins-esque. I also did some work last year on cultivating my dream life and practicing recording and interpreting what came to me and it was there that I realised there was this block around being a man. That I've been there, done that. One person said to me "it's like you're saying 'I'd rather do nothing and be nothing, achieve nothing at all than to risk being one of those kinds of men'" and that was exactly what I heard reflected back to me the other week in my open space session on male maturity - "I don't want to be a grown-up if it means being like the role models on offer".

And what I've realised is that I was only aware of the shadow archetypes, the tyrant or the weakling (for example I had a dream where I was in a meeting with Peter Mandelson and Jeremy Corbyn, in the period before the election last year when Corbyn hadn't stepped into his own power much. I ended up smashing Mandelson's head in with an ashtray...). And what I've realised since is that I was ignorant of the mature archetypes whose energy is available to me.

I was protecting myself from the shadows by avoiding either. Even though I've known for a while that the answer to the shadow is always acceptance and examination rather than avoidance. Taking it on the chin, knowing it to be true and part of me and then finding some way to leave it behind. But I'd also got this little pocket of shadow that I believed to be unacceptable and unforgiveable and so wasn't willing to explore it or even admit it fully to myself.

And we know that until we admit the problem to ourselves, no-one else can help us. The help just isn't accessible, even if we're aware of it.