How scary it might prove to conclude that I am essentially alone in this summons to personal consciousness, that I cannot continue to blame others for what has happened to me, that I am really out there on that tightrope over the abyss, making choices every day, and that I am truly, irrevocably responsible for my life. That I would have to grow up, stand naked before this immense brutal universe, and step in to the largeness of this journey, my journey. 109.

If you want to cure a neurosis, you have to risk something.”2.

Achieving a more conscious participation in a richer story proves a great gift after all.

Something within each of us is stirred by forms, images, values, to which others may prove indifferent or incredulous. If such images and forms speak to us, occasion resonance, then they express in outer form some analogue to what lies within.

Paradoxically, our ability to see something of the Shadow within ourselves sharpens our capacity to recognize shadowy actions around us.

Without a larger measure of consciousness, we cannot begin to struggle with fate. We rather remain its prisoner. It behooves all of us to look at the prevalent patterns of our lives and ask what “story” they might be serving.

None of us would admit to having “bad character,” although we have all done bad things. In fact, a person who has never done anything “bad” will be a pretty superficial, infantile being, and that is a bad thing.

We have to recall the functional definition of the Shadow as that which renders us uncomfortable in confronting in ourselves.

Today, as we have seen, fascism and communism are discredited, but are replaced by a paraphilic consumer culture driven by fantasy, desperately in search of distractions and escalating sensations, and a fundamentalist culture wherein the rigors of a private journey are shunned in favor of an ideology that, at the expense of the paradoxes and complexities of truth, favors one-sided resolutions, black-and-white values, and a privileging of one’s own complexes as the norm for others.

Only a spirituality that confesses that it knows not has a shot at growing, evolving, engaging the perils and uncertainties of the journey and of staying by our side when things get rough.