Jung had this idea. The idea was very good and even better than that, it is true. He said – I’d rather be whole than “good”. The “good” is used conditionally here because what it means to be “good” is mostly a social construct of a moral and interpersonal climate you happened to be born into. To be “good” in a specific way your surroundings describes it meant burning off, denying and renouncing the parts of you that were shunned by society.

(for the intro explaining what shadow work is slide to the previous post)

The moral construct we have now is not the universal morality. It was artificially built and in it we incorporated what we were told is “good”, and have disassociated ourselves from some other things, believing they have no moral utility. This may not be true. What we’ve suppressed may have been a thing we needed to function properly. Nietzsche had something to say on this acquired, socially built up, morality and considered it mostly cowardice due to the shaming and punishing some behaviors out of existence. It is not that we don’t want to hurt someone because we’re really good, it is we’re afraid to hurt them due to the punishment of the social or we’re just harmless to begin with. Harmless and moral are not the same thing. A chicken is not moral for not doing harm, it just has no capacity to do so. Hyper simplified morality stops us form accessing the deeper parts of our psyche, primal urges which are very hard to integrate, but they are necessary fo us to come out whole out of the submission to our society’s rules of conduct in our formative years.

There is no true morality or wholeness in a person if we don’t integrate the shadow parts of ourselves, and draw them from the unconscious to the conscious to serve us intelligently instead of rot in the dark, causing all sorts of dichotomies, cognitive dissonances, rogue emotions and harmful behaviors, while we parade around with our acquired morality as a mask. None of us are purely good. We have malevolence in us. The world has it as well. Acknowledging this in us and the world makes us functional, it becomes a self-preservation mechanism of wellbeing because once you understand you can be dangerous an do harm if pushed too far, now you can say no and really mean it, Now you can set boundaries of what is unacceptable to you and now you can start respecting yourself and respecting others, as well as having real deep compassion for them – where you help because you want to not because you’re afraid of the social judgement if you don’t help. Understanding and integrating the potential for monstrosity AND THEN NOT ACTING ON IT BECAUSE YOU CHOOSE NOT TO, is the shadow work that becomes the highest form of light work. So we invite the lowest parts of ourrselves into the light and integrate them into the superego.

We should be able to do the things you choose not to do. That is morality. If there is no capability to do them and we mask this lack as “being virtuous” that is a lie and we know it, and everybody around us knows it. Integrate the shadow, set your boundaries in a way that allows you to not become a monster. This is what it means to emotionally grow up. The parts of you that need to burn of are not the parts of you that are dark, but the ones that prevent the darkness from being integrated into the light of consciousness. Do the shadow work. If it is hard and emotions come up – it means you’re doing it right and the tectonics are changing.