Hell is empty; all the devils are here.
~ William Shakespeare.
It's a funny sort of coincidence isn't it, considering the narcissism and self-absorption our culture encourages us to dwell in, that it has not yet become an acceptable idea in our Western cultures that your normal everyday Joe or Gina on the street - or you - have a deep, dark, nasty side. A side that we may see occasionally, but flinch from. Our shadow sides.
Even more so the idea that contained within that shadow side could be something scary, destructive, diabolical. Sure, we like to examine the darker depths of those who we perceive as "monsters" or "animals". Those people we examine under microscopes, horrified and compelled, at the levels that some humans can stoop to.
But just not us. Or at least, not me. Maybe you. Maybe everyone I come into contact with, but certainly and definitely not me.
We find it very hard, almost impossible, to believe that we could be capable of the same sorts of things as those people. We scrabble to distance ourselves from them because we cannot bear to think about the alternative - that we are all capable of abhorrence.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, the storyteller and Jungian analyst, talks about the predator, the part of our psyche which is unredeemable, which cannot listen to reason. The demonic part of our souls. Many of us in the nominally Christian West rail at that idea on several different levels. Firstly, the Devil has been perceived via the childish abomination that is the Christian religion to be something outside of ourselves, some stupid caricature. It all seems so childish.
But what if the demonic lives in here? What if the Devil is a part of us all? It would mean, yes, that we have to face and fight that which we are terrified of, which we almost cannot bear to admit lives in us. But if the Devil is a part of us all, then for balance and hope's sake could we not also believe (and maybe even experience in oure more enlightened moments) that the God is in here too. To help us. Whether you see God/Devil as individual personages or as archetypes doesn't seem to make all that much difference in the outcomes of things, from where I'm seeing it today. But then that's another story for another time :)
To face and do battle with these elements of our own psyches is, from where I'm sitting, turning into a matter of life and death. Because if we do not face the dark elements of our own psyches, we will find it harder (or maybe even impossible) to face those same dark elements in the world. And those dark elements are routinely and systematically destroying our earth, even in the face of climate change, for their own shortsighted ends.
As above, so below. And as within, so without. Those destructive forces that I see in my own soul, they threaten to overwhelm me, to destroy me, just like they are threatening in the outer world. Those same forces are in you. It is only by acknowledging them, facing them down, learning to not bow to them, learning to not be terrified in their presence - owning them - that I learn, almost in disbelief, that these elements only have the power that I give them. And that I can take that power away.
It is where anger comes into its own. It is an energy. It fires itself slowly in your belly, into flame, into the energy that it takes to rouse yourself into productivity, into movement, out of torpor, out of stupor.
