If you're someone who hangs out occasionally along the avenues of the subtle, does it feel important to you to partake in education with respect to what is going on on this plane, like, at all?
My question that I'm working on is: where does silence have Her place?
There's been a bunch of conversations and experiences I could band together and Dymo-print a label for, reading: 'Various Abuses of the Subtle'.
This includes everything from subtle sexisms, racisms & ageisms, to the validity of emotional abuse, to what can and can't be expected to be treated in psychotherapy and alternative forms of healthcare to some good old fashioned myth-elimination for neurons 'firing together and wiring together' and thereby creating our own realities, or some other form of wonder birthed from 'The Secret' movie genre.
Carl Jung delivered a blessing to Western culture when he conceived the concept of the 'shadow'. In this day and age we're graced with a linguistic space that captures the non-embodied, but ever present, part of our unconscious, habituated responses that are a product of being a human being with a brain. Jung tended to characterise the shadow as crippling, but for my thinking there is a hell of a lot about the shadow that is enabling, too.
With respect to the 'crippled shadow', consciousness-raising becomes valuable when it effects harm minimisation. Advertisers know how to speak to our subconscious psyche through product placement and subliminalities in media. In Western culture, overt forms of the 'isms' encounter social ostracism, but there's still a heck of a lot of interpersonal interaction that could use some clarity birthed through education about subtle means of influence.
There's an awareness to be grown regarding the legitimacy of emotional abuse, for which the scars are never as evident, but the ramifications are just as disabling (in my experience in fact, moreso).
Particularly in Australian society, receiving mental health care no longer needs to be the anxiety-causing loony-bin landing life sentence that it once represented. Again, the relief comes through an educative process about what does and does not happen in therapy, the subtle, mostly mental signs that actually there is a road to relief from suffering that does not have to involve mega-doses of Haldol or a lobotomy.
The 'enabled shadow' has two aspects - firstly, there's a growth in understanding our own individual thought processes to allow ourselves to tune into our inner guidance in a more direct way. This comes through deepening our engagement with our inner cripple AND with our inner hero - a good place to start looking for the inner hero is to look at the people or qualities that we admire, and to think/feel out why this might be the case. Enabling a dialog between these aspects of the self is best enhanced in a place of meditation and contemplation. Enabling a dialog in this way can be scary, serious stuff, well met when it is accompanied by some of that not-so-scary-psychotherapy that I spoke about above. It's never not worth the journey, but it often calls for some resilience in the face of discomfort to get through.
The enabled shadow allows for enhanced efficiency. Which sounds like something only a motor vehicle or a refrigerator should have, but what I mean is that once you become a little clearer on the influences that shape your present thinking and behaviour you can start to choose which ones to pay attention to. You're less likely to be encumbered by a life story that is not a making of your very own. It's called discernment - allowing the whole world to be your advisory board and then choosing your own self-advised path.
Maybe I'm casting my 'subtle' definition net far too widely, and dipping far beyond need into mundane-world examples. My glinty-eyed question becomes thus - if there is a deeper and more encompassing experience to be privy to, and if we can sit comfortably with the notion that the mirror-turned-back-on-the-self till self disappears is, well, the Great Work never to be laid down, is there enough room to turn back around and look at the language (by which I mean dominant discourse) of those that we share our collective buying power with and incorporate the phenomena into the conversation, in this way?
Good heavens, look at that, a rant. I must have some serious study to do.
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