Shadows Must be Good too

...if all things are Soul, and Soul is basically Good, what about the abhorrent?

We can call “God” the Soul Field, The All, or “The One with no Other,” as the Kybalion’s pseudonymous author has it.

To define is to literally make finite, so we won’t do that. But we can think of God as The All: every speck of matter, every iota of consciousness.

Every star and every quark.

Everything.

All of it.

In addition to having no Other, The All is traditionally considered already infinitely loving, infinitely perfect, infinitely good. Good, after all, derives from God. Something that is good is just something godly.

We might say that if The All can’t be defined, we can’t describe it with one half of a binary. But if it isn’t anything, if it is nothing, if it is everything, we could call it whatever we want.

I think “good” is good enough.

But if The All is good, and all things are in the All… what the actual fuck is up with all these Nazis?

Why write if you won’t tackle the Big Questions?

I went on a sabbatical from this blog for around six months after my son was born. It was for a variety of reasons. They included everything from mental health crises to deep philosophical, existential uncertainty about the possibility of being Visible in a world that incentivizes Creators to side with (or reinforce-via-protest) the blooming fascist movement.

The Sabbatical Series so far includes my reflections on seeking Resonance rather than metrics in my writing, and avoiding conjuring Dick-First (toxically masculine) energy when manifesting my personal “cozyweb” Digital Sangha—a small, safe, secluded, cozy online space.

The present essay deals with the Nazi problem that helped prevent me from writing for half a year.

The incentives and media infrastructure of our profoundly sick society continually attempt to railroad Creatives into being won over by what Naomi Klein calls the “embrace of selective belonging” which, to me, seems almost hypnotically wielded by the alt-right. Even worse, the culturally sanctioned and algorithmically promoted ways to protest that movement themselves make the unwanted problem even worse. Most simply by giving the Nazis something to use as a recruitment tool.

As Ram Dass says, “Hippies Create Police. Police Create Hippies. If you're in polarity you're creating polar opposites.”

As Eckhart Tolle says, “Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists.”

As Lao Tzu says, “Give evil nothing to oppose, and it will disappear on its own.”

So here is the third Big Question that led me to take a sabbatical from Creekmason creativity.

In order to be a public intellectual, you need to be selling a solution. In order to sell a solution, you need to have a problem. If your solution is already sold to all the people who naturally agree that your problem is part of their lives, you need to inflate that problem or make it scarier.

Being a public intellectual on today's internet naturally means adding more fear to the world.

Can I share my “special me-ness” without falling into this trap?

If God is good, and All is God, and Shadows exist in the All… Shadows must be Good too.

This model, which I call “The Archetypal Wavelength,” maps the motion of all pendulous cycles from low to high, from contracted to expansive, from shadow to light—and back again—containing all poles as aspects of a single Wavelength. Aspects, that is, of The All.

It wasn't David versus Goliath, it was a pendulum
Eternally swayin' from the dark to the light
And the more intensely that the light shone, the darker the shadow it cast
It was never really a battle for me to win, it was an eternal dance
And like a dance, the more rigid I became, the harder it got
The more I cursed my clumsy footsteps, the more I struggled
So I got older and I learned to relax
And I learned to soften and that dance got easier

~ Ren, Hi Ren

What if, instead of fear of an Other that sells tickets to courses, my writing focuses on spreading a posture of appreciation? Appreciation of the ever-swinging pendulum between darkness and light.

What if my art could be language and meaning that supports celebration of the rhythmic highs and lows constantly compensating for one another in that inevitable cycle through endless time.

Consider that when you zoom out, even the dualism of Nazi and Antifa can be included, though not morally equivalent, as the energetic poles on a wavelength of a singular All.

The ups and downs of a wave through the air? That’s sound. A note struck. A chord played. The vibration of the infinitely good Word the Bible says there was “in the beginning,” still being articulated.

The Word itself is The All.

There must be learning available through both the highs and lows. Through both the Light and Shadows of The All.

Learning is what we’re here to do.

We are the Universe experiencing itself.

Why did the Universe want to experience Nazis?

As a species we have agreed to incarnate in order to learn the lessons of separation.

That is, the lessons that are only available when we believe that we are separate individuals: ”individual” units of being that cannot (in-) be divided (-dividual) further.

An atom might seem like a separate thing, but zoom out and it, along with other atoms, simply appears to be a molecule. A single molecule, when we zoom out and take it together with other molecules, looks like a single cell. A being is one entity composed of many cells. A civilization is one thing made of many beings.

The All is all of it and more: other planets, other stars, the space between them.

Zoom out enough and everything is inside the picture frame.

Everything is actually one thing.

But zoomed in to the level of a human incarnation, it sure seems like we’re separate. We each have our own name! I can’t move your hand with just a thought. I can’t feel your emotions.

But think. Referential language and the privacy of thoughts and emotions are not absolute. We could communicate telepathically and they’d all disappear.

But we, as a collective of Soul making plans in the Liminal Bardo, agreed to create and incarnate into a species that thinks itself separate.

Why? One lesson that would be impossible without the illusion of differentiation is that Shadows must be good too.

Speaking of a fae creature that knows the future, Patrick Rothfuss writes in Wise Man’s Fear:

“A blind man has to stumble through a cluttered room. You don’t. You use your eyes and pick the easy way. It’s clear to you as anything.”

That is our Higher Selves. The aspect of you or me that is outside of time doesn’t have to fumble its way through the future. It can pick the easy—or hard—way. It can pick whatever way is required.

And I guess that the Higher Self that has come as me—which is like a wave in the same ocean as the phenotypically different wave that is the Higher Self come as you, aspects of the same body of water that only seem distinct when you’re zoomed in—wanted to figure out what it felt like to ride out a polycrisis with Fascists at the helm.

This long-haired hippy idiot isn’t about to say Nazis are a good thing, is he?

There are actions that cannot be a part of an infinitely good God.

Working from my own interpretation of Paul Selig’s channeled literature, while a conscious being is invoking duality via believing that they are a separate self, duality is real. And while duality is real, actions that deny God are possible.

As is often said, we shouldn’t confuse the map for the territory. The words and models used to describe a phenomenon inevitably require shortcuts. A several mile stretch of beautiful shoreline textured with jagged cliffs and caves is simplified to a mostly straight line. A vibrant city with its own character and history is reduced to a dot, identical to every other city’s dot.

The concept of a reality filled with discrete, disconnected, separate individuals is an inaccurate map of the nondual—singular, unified, “not two,” forget more than two—territory you get when you zoom out and capture the whole universe in the picture frame.

But it seems that, paradoxically, while a being believes it to be true, that being can act as if it is true. The map (separation) becomes the terrain of another map (a belief that there are parts of reality outside of God), and in this recursive way, it is real. The being who believes in separation, can step into the darkness that denies God and create immense pain from that place that appears to be outside of or incompatible with goodness (i.e. godliness).

Furthermore, there is suffering that is just suffering when viewed from inside the human experience. An experience that is nearly impossible to be outside of while you’re still alive on Earth.

There are circumstances that do not make us stronger. Not at the level of the small “s” self, which is, of course, all we truly know.

To say “everything happens for a reason” to a hurricane victim, or a woman who has lost her pregnancy, or even someone whose cat got hit by a car… that’s the epitome of callous spiritual bypassing. Of avoiding confronting challenging feelings by putting on airs of phony holiness.

But what’s more: to say “everything happens for a reason” to a victim of human cruelty and evil? Unthinkable. Almost an evil in itself.

And yet.

Can we frame Shadow as resistance? Can we frame fear—and everything downstream from it, from greed, to exploitation, to murder—as a force resisting the infinite abundance, love, perfection, and goodness of The All?

For fear to operate, there needs to be a belief in the existence of separation. If All is one, there is nothing to fear. It’s like fearing my own hand might slap me silly.

“So what,” you say?

Well, don't we always need resistance in order to get stronger? Weights are heavy. That means they resist being lifted. But in lifting them, we grow. Yes we tear muscle in small ways. There is likely pain. But through the opportunity created by rupture, there’s a chance for repair, and that regrowth is what makes a muscle stronger.

But if it isn’t our small “s” selves growing, what is it that benefits from our struggle against the resistance created and inhabited by Shadow?

The All as a Soul Field—as mist that condenses into matter.

Let’s visualize The All as a vaporous ocean of Soul that condenses—“becomes denser” by vibrating more slowly—to form matter. Like steam freezing into ice. But the vapor can also animate matter, as if the steam could somehow make one snowman see its neighbor as inferior and worthy of extermination.

Consciousness—Soul: the vapor—can find ways to express whenever it encounters a complex system of dense matter—Soul: the ice. According to Integrated Information Theory, this can be something as simple as a thermostat changing the same room temperature it senses, to something as complex as the human brain.

The condensation of spirit into matter as depicted in a recent, highly clarifying, Note written by Scott Britton.

There are aspects of this Soul Field that choose to incarnate (It's us! Or rather our Higher Selves), or that express as cooperative, complex collectives of beings like an ant hive or the egregore that is a corporation, or, so I believe, that speak to those of the incarnated who have mediumship abilities.

There's a lot we can explain by positing that there are also aspects of the Soul Field that manifest as ”Shadows that must be good too.” Whether it’s literal or not, we can think of these aspects of Soul that exist in duality, outside of goodness, as aliens if we wish—aliens that feed on fear.

These “aliens” are sometimes described as aspects of the Soul Field that eat the painful emotional energy, called “loosh,” created through negative experiences.

These are the negative experiences that we might put outside of God. Experiences so terrible that they can’t possibly be contained in a perfect All. That call into question the very perfection of the All.

But that Shadow of loosh feeding aliens...

Of the tech bros that those “aliens” inspire to do Nazi salutes at the inauguration (imagine the loosh that flapping arm generated!)...

Even me when those “aliens” get in my head and trick me into stepping outside of the Light to drag the person who cut me off in traffic into the Shadow. To drag that Tesla driver outside of God by judging them as Bad. Condemning them as something separate from me, a Good driver...

These are all contained within the All if you just zoom out enough.

None of them is a thing to fear.

Not anymore than we should fear the resistance of a barbell our capable muscles strain to lift.

All Practice Involves Resistance

All practice involves a low point (when the weight is at its nadir and you're not sure you can bench it again) that precedes a return to the target state.

And it's the motion of the return—that muscle flex—that expands God's knowledge of itself and drives the All toward greater complexity, wholeness, beauty, goodness, love, and divinity. These are the things the Soul Field, The All, God, is fundamentally composed of but can’t experience without inventing separation.

All those positive qualities are already maximally expressed in The All’s perfection, but paradoxically, the All doesn’t know what they are like until it learns about them through the separate beings it creates and incarnates into.

Every opportunity is an opportunity to know yourself in a new way. In the face of pain, you may know yourself in strength. In the face of loss, you may know yourself as gifted. In the face of death, you may know yourself as alive.

~ Paul Selig, The Book of Knowing and Worth

All practices (from lifting weights to meditation to lovingkindness to maintaining a Positive Mental Attitude) definitionally involve a lapse or low point that you’re practicing recovering from.

As Sharon Salzberg says, “the healing is in the return.” With many practices it’s actually the muscle flex of getting back to the target state that is the whole point.

This is the same pendulous cycle depicted in The Archetypal Wavelength above. The rise and fall of this Wavelength could be a graph of a barbell’s height over time. Note that Phase Six, Restoration, where the work happens.

The athlete, the torn muscle regrowing stronger, and the barbell are all part of God. What else could they be?

Similarly, the Light, the lessons we came to learn in human school, and the Shadow are all God.

Once again: Shadows must be good, too.

Although a Shadow couldn’t enact the evil it does without claiming itself apart from God, it can’t really get outside of The All. The Shadow is still an element of the Wavelength. Still an aspect of the Soul Field.

You may be thinking, “No part of me is a Nazi!”

But each of us are the ocean in a drop rather than a drop in the ocean. All is contained within each. Each is All.

My Nazi shadow is the one that recognizes the supremacy of whatever ideology I prefer to Naziism. The supremacist part of me wants all people to find my ideas just as valuable as I do. The fascist in me believes we could all get along if everyone just agreed with me about love, soul, anarchy, diversity and tolerance.

It seems obvious that there's a good kind of "everyone should think and behave like me" at a certain zoom level. That's how we resolve “the paradox of tolerance”: we don't tolerate intolerance.

Without Nazis, the Soul Field couldn’t learn that nothing, not even tolerance, is absolute.

Without the Shadow, there would be nothing to contrast the light. No foil for its beauty. But also, the All would have no way to learn about that which we leave the Light to drag into the Shadow—characteristics we pretend are not within our capabilities, like intolerance and believing that some ideas are superior to others.

Nazis are abhorrent.

And in overcoming the Nazis, the universe becomes more conscious and compassionate.

The struggle that the Nazis create—the obstacle to consciousness and compassion—is part of the path, in the way that all obstacles are. When we, as a civilization, handle our Nazi problem, we will be a stronger and more compassionate civilization than we were before the Nazis showed up.

We will have learned what a more powerful experience of the sanctity of life is like by defeating a force that degrades life and profanes against it.

But somehow we have to do so without profaning against life ourselves.

Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Only love can drive out hate…” I’d add: more hate might move books, though

As Duncan Trussell says, the incentive for someone who sells umbrellas is to make sure it keeps on raining.

The incentive of a public intellectual—a political influencer—who decries fascism is to actually empower the fascists so they, the influencer, get more followers. More paid subscriptions. More people signing up for their courses.

They have to either convince more people the Others are scary or, sometimes, subconsciously find ways to materially empower the Others so they truly are scarier.

To say nothing of greed, simply because of inflation, our economy demands endless growth simply for subsistence.

That rule applies to influencers too.

The possibly-not-metaphorical loosh-feeding-aliens are the only ones who win. The righteous influencer creates fear for them to feed on. The abhorrent influencer uses the righteous one’s success as a recruitment tool. More fear. More duality. More Shadow.

I think we’ve learned enough. I think we’re ready to be done with Naziism. I truly believe that despite how dark things seem, we’re moments away from putting Nazis firmly in our past and manifesting the more loving society our hearts know is possible.

We may still learn through Shadow in the eternal dance, but let it be a new Shadow. Perhaps it could be a less abhorrent shadow, closer to the Universe’s ultimate destination of the reunification of God?

So when it comes to returning from sabbatical, my objective is to come down clearly in favor of protest, but not concretize the problem by becoming a participant in the market that sells protest.

Instead, I intend to use this space to platform the Wavelength itself. Could this be what I am here for? Could this calling be why I developed the mood symptoms that earned me a Bipolar diagnosis?

I want to attract Sangha members who can flirt with the notion that our Shadow is just another aspect of the same wavelength, the same eternal dance, the same Soul that has come as you or me.

The swelling of a wave, its crest, its crash, its return to the ocean… any of these might appear to be a distinct phenomenon when zoomed in closely enough. When I list them as I’ve just done—with different words naming them, with commas separating them—they seem distinct.

Language creates an illusion.

Zoom out. Zoom out. Zoom out.

There is only a wave. There is only water. There is only Earth. There is only Soul.

All is in The All.

All dualities. All binaries. Just the highs and lows of a single infinitely good Wavelength.

Light is good. And so our Shadows must be good too, because what else could they be?

---

Here’s what a GPT trained on Creekmason writing thinks will make a good anchor image for this essay.

Lastly. This essay is pretty much dedicated to

Content Carrier ('CC')

, whose musings and provocations on the Creekmason Discord inspired syntheses and responses that helped me answer one of my Sabbatical’s “Big Questions.” Thanks fren!