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1998/09/03 16:06
kundalini-l-d Digest V98 #626


kundalini-l-d Digest Volume 98 : Issue 626

Today's Topics:
  The shadow [ "Paul" <paulwestATnospamstationone.demon.c ]
  Re: gurus [ "Paul" <paulwestATnospamstationone.demon.c ]
  Re: The shadow [ "Sharon Webb" <shawebbATnospamyhc.edu> ]
  Re: gurus [ "Debora A. Orf" <dorf01ATnospammail.win.or ]
  Re: The shadow [ Barbara Alexander <nickynoodleATnospamnetr ]
  Re: Enforced spirituality [ SvnElvn972ATnospamaol.com ]
  Re: The shadow [ Andrew Alcott Shaver <ashaverATnospamumich ]
Date: 3 Sep 98 21:32:08 +0000
From: "Paul" <paulwestATnospamstationone.demon.co.uk>
To: kundalini-lATnospamexecpc.com
Subject: The shadow
Message-Id: <OUT-35EF07DE.MD-1.0.paulwestATnospamstationone.demon.co.uk>

Hi.

This morning I was introduced to my shadow. Not a pretty sight.
Actually there was no visual input but it is an experience in
consciousness, the form of the consciousness, that relayed the full
extent of the hatred that was there.

An old friend got in touch with me a couple of days ago, which snapped
me out of some spiritual romanticism I was having. I talked with him
about the past and what had been happening in the past 3 years. I told
him about how I behaved in college and what it was like for me. He
said that I was a lot more popular than I realised. This was true, I
think. He said that generally everyone thought I was a very nice guy.

I have read in some other places that I am likely o appear to others
as `nice', and I do, and for all my life this has been mainly the way
I felt obliged to present myself. I always tried to be tactful and
nice and unviolent. But this was enforced. I always had to repress my
emotions and say things that were contrary to how I felt, to please
other people and to keep the peace that I apparently wanted and
desired so much.

But always there has been a darker side. Only one person ever
mentioned it to me face to face, and she said that there was just
something about me that she didn't like. She said it in a pleasant way
but I knew, yet unaknowledged, that she was right. Others have on
occasion written that there is a darker side to me. Sometimes I have
welcomed it enforced its righteousness.

Underneath the pleasantness and the niceness and the kindness and the
attractiveness I have always deeply been eaten but hatred, anger,
aggression and all sorts of dark emotions, feelings and attitudes. I
always hid these because I wanted to be nicer, kinder, more pleasant.
The worse this got the more it seemed I had to struggle to enforce my
pleasantness.

I had an illness of politeness on a number of occasions. It has always
bothered me. There is a very sad line from a Madonna song which
touches me very deeply "I know how to smile but I don't know
happyness". This has for a long time been true. I always disliked the
appearance of other people smiling falsely, perhaps so that I would
not have to face my own dissection.

In other ways I have found myself to be trying to enforce my wellbeing
by thinking silly things, such as that I am weak so I have to become
stronger, or that I am no good so I have to please authority more. I
think I have gone down the same route, in a general and more exensive
sense, with this great darkness that is deep, deep inside like a most
disgusting root thick and stubborn like an anti-spiritual veruca. I
actually hate the darker side of me and this is how it appears to me,
and I think probably the darker side of me has a number of weak
`light' qualities, or at least the appearance of them.

I had a dream in the night in which there was blackness and not
visible form. I experienced with my consciousness what was there. The
blackness assisted in isolating the problem and seeing it with fresh
awareness, in contrast. It was part of me. I was me. This person that
stood in front of me was filled with an immense hatred, anger,
aggression, stubbornness, violence, disgust and offence. This person
to me was the projection of hatred, like an embodiment of it, but it
was as if a piece of jigsaw to which whatever was left of me was the
matching piece.

The person kicked me very hard in the stomach in an act of apparently
unreasoned violence. It hurt, and it woke me up with a start, and I
could feel this injury, an actual experience of it in my body. Not to
the same extent but it was definately there. For the first several
hours of today this person was inside of me. I think it has always
been, but only today have I looked at it or dared aknowledge it.

Seeing this hatred inside of me, deeply covered up, I am now having to
ask - "what is doing the covering up?". There seems to be a very thick
mask, manufactured of kindness and politeness and all things pretty
and weak, whereas deep inside at the end of the root there is a cold,
sick, twisted hate and loathing, like a gut feeling, an ultimate
hidden opinion about everything. It is horrible and deformed and truly
this is actually a way that I feel. I actually hate the world.

Always I have hidden the way I feel because I was concerned how it
would appear to others. So I became polite and the worse I felt the
more I made up some fraudulent farce to hide my true feeling. And so
it grew worse and always me feelings were intermingled with the hatred
and the darkness of seperation. And never did I want to look anywhere
towards that dark self because it was so much to the other extreme.
But there it is inside of me, a viscious enforcement.

I am not a peaceful person. The peace that I have is a calmness that
is enforced and pretended. Even that which I spoke recently coming
from `the heart' was a delusion of kindness and prettyness in a
sophisticated cover of the other side of me, the side that I rarely
aknowledge. I have a hatred about `you' and probably I know why but I
feel that I don't want to know why or to look at that. I have never
really asserted how I truly feel, spoke my mind, always the tact and
the interpreting and the elegand on-the-fly restructuring to make it
sound attractive and desirable.

In some ways I feel that I don't know what to do, but I bet that
actually I do know. It is all written within me. There is a very hurt,
hateful, evil, corrupt person inside of me that is attempting to share
the space with a very weak, fraudulent, pretentious, kind and
attractive identity. None of them ever dare to look at the other. And
now I think I have birthed a third.

I always associate with the light person. The dark person I always
think of as other. Maybe both have precicely the same qualities but it
only appears to the contrary. There are illusions about seperation
that I have yet to work through. Every hatred that `I' feel about the
dark side makes it the hating thing that it is, and every hatred that
the `I' feels about the light side makes the light side what it is. So
there are two `I's. I did not expect this. I have always looked to
philosophies that only have one I and I have always thought that the
otherness was the only evil. It is closer to home.

I went onto an IRC channel recently and I said that I felt I was evil.
They diregarded it and kicked me off. Apparently I was playing games.
I was, but at the same time I didn't want to be. There is so much
contradiction. I have to learn to love the darker side and accept that
it is right inside of `me' the lighter side, and to realise that `I'
am the darker side and that the lighter identity that usually thinks
it is the observer is the `other' that normally appears identityless.

I think this is true for everyone but this is my own personal
nightmare. There are two of me and that bothers me. Being introduced
to this fact is not a very pleasant thing. Probably there is already
rejection in suggesting that the darker side is the other. The lighter
side of me is just as bad. All of it, these two identities, the split,
the conflict, the relationship, the dis-ease, the hatred and the lust,
the extreme weakness and extreme strength, the violence and the
enforced peace, is all _here_.

Although I am talking about myself I hope that I am letting you in. I
think that is the way now.

--
Paul.

IRC: #amiga, Dalnet: #blitz
WWW: http://www.stationone.demon.co.uk
E-M: paulATnospamstationone.demon.co.uk
Date: 3 Sep 98 21:38:10 +0000
From: "Paul" <paulwestATnospamstationone.demon.co.uk>
To: kundalini-lATnospamexecpc.com
Subject: Re: gurus
Message-Id: <OUT-35EF0C42.MD-1.0.paulwestATnospamstationone.demon.co.uk>

> What sort of person qualifies as a guru/teacher?
>
> What sort of level of 'submission' is appropriate?
>
> Does seeing the guru as god/buddha whatever mean you have to obey them
> completly?

You are asking for something very complicated. You need three whole
questions in order to cover the bases?

--
Paul.

IRC: #amiga, Dalnet: #blitz
WWW: http://www.stationone.demon.co.uk
E-M: paulATnospamstationone.demon.co.uk
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 1998 16:44:13 -0400
From: "Sharon Webb" <shawebbATnospamyhc.edu>
To: "Paul" <paulwestATnospamstationone.demon.co.uk>, <kundalini-lATnospamexecpc.com>
Subject: Re: The shadow
Message-ID: <006801bdd77b$9d7e6ee0$b4d11fa8ATnospamsharonwe>
Content-Type: text/plain;
 charset="iso-8859-1"

Paul,

Everybody has a shadow side. The fact that you've recognized it is very
good. What you need to be aware of now, is that your shadow is not evil.
He was probably created when you were very small. He is just an angry
frightened little kid. He only appears evil because you fed that aspect by
repressing him---as we all do.

You're quite right. You need to love him and accept him and integrate him
into your being because he is part of you. When you do, you'll find it is a
significant step toward wholeness---and you will also learn that he is your
strength.

Love,
Sharon

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul <paulwestATnospamstationone.demon.co.uk>
To: kundalini-lATnospamexecpc.com <kundalini-lATnospamexecpc.com>
Date: Thursday, September 03, 1998 4:37 PM
Subject: The shadow

>Hi.
>
>This morning I was introduced to my shadow. Not a pretty sight.
>Actually there was no visual input but it is an experience in
>consciousness, the form of the consciousness, that relayed the full
>extent of the hatred that was there.
>
>An old friend got in touch with me a couple of days ago, which snapped
>me out of some spiritual romanticism I was having. I talked with him
>about the past and what had been happening in the past 3 years. I told
>him about how I behaved in college and what it was like for me. He
>said that I was a lot more popular than I realised. This was true, I
>think. He said that generally everyone thought I was a very nice guy.
>
>I have read in some other places that I am likely o appear to others
>as `nice', and I do, and for all my life this has been mainly the way
>I felt obliged to present myself. I always tried to be tactful and
>nice and unviolent. But this was enforced. I always had to repress my
>emotions and say things that were contrary to how I felt, to please
>other people and to keep the peace that I apparently wanted and
>desired so much.
>
>But always there has been a darker side. Only one person ever
>mentioned it to me face to face, and she said that there was just
>something about me that she didn't like. She said it in a pleasant way
>but I knew, yet unaknowledged, that she was right. Others have on
>occasion written that there is a darker side to me. Sometimes I have
>welcomed it enforced its righteousness.
>
>Underneath the pleasantness and the niceness and the kindness and the
>attractiveness I have always deeply been eaten but hatred, anger,
>aggression and all sorts of dark emotions, feelings and attitudes. I
>always hid these because I wanted to be nicer, kinder, more pleasant.
>The worse this got the more it seemed I had to struggle to enforce my
>pleasantness.
>
>I had an illness of politeness on a number of occasions. It has always
>bothered me. There is a very sad line from a Madonna song which
>touches me very deeply "I know how to smile but I don't know
>happyness". This has for a long time been true. I always disliked the
>appearance of other people smiling falsely, perhaps so that I would
>not have to face my own dissection.
>
>In other ways I have found myself to be trying to enforce my wellbeing
>by thinking silly things, such as that I am weak so I have to become
>stronger, or that I am no good so I have to please authority more. I
>think I have gone down the same route, in a general and more exensive
>sense, with this great darkness that is deep, deep inside like a most
>disgusting root thick and stubborn like an anti-spiritual veruca. I
>actually hate the darker side of me and this is how it appears to me,
>and I think probably the darker side of me has a number of weak
>`light' qualities, or at least the appearance of them.
>
>I had a dream in the night in which there was blackness and not
>visible form. I experienced with my consciousness what was there. The
>blackness assisted in isolating the problem and seeing it with fresh
>awareness, in contrast. It was part of me. I was me. This person that
>stood in front of me was filled with an immense hatred, anger,
>aggression, stubbornness, violence, disgust and offence. This person
>to me was the projection of hatred, like an embodiment of it, but it
>was as if a piece of jigsaw to which whatever was left of me was the
>matching piece.
>
>The person kicked me very hard in the stomach in an act of apparently
>unreasoned violence. It hurt, and it woke me up with a start, and I
>could feel this injury, an actual experience of it in my body. Not to
>the same extent but it was definately there. For the first several
>hours of today this person was inside of me. I think it has always
>been, but only today have I looked at it or dared aknowledge it.
>
>Seeing this hatred inside of me, deeply covered up, I am now having to
>ask - "what is doing the covering up?". There seems to be a very thick
>mask, manufactured of kindness and politeness and all things pretty
>and weak, whereas deep inside at the end of the root there is a cold,
>sick, twisted hate and loathing, like a gut feeling, an ultimate
>hidden opinion about everything. It is horrible and deformed and truly
>this is actually a way that I feel. I actually hate the world.
>
>Always I have hidden the way I feel because I was concerned how it
>would appear to others. So I became polite and the worse I felt the
>more I made up some fraudulent farce to hide my true feeling. And so
>it grew worse and always me feelings were intermingled with the hatred
>and the darkness of seperation. And never did I want to look anywhere
>towards that dark self because it was so much to the other extreme.
>But there it is inside of me, a viscious enforcement.
>
>I am not a peaceful person. The peace that I have is a calmness that
>is enforced and pretended. Even that which I spoke recently coming
>from `the heart' was a delusion of kindness and prettyness in a
>sophisticated cover of the other side of me, the side that I rarely
>aknowledge. I have a hatred about `you' and probably I know why but I
>feel that I don't want to know why or to look at that. I have never
>really asserted how I truly feel, spoke my mind, always the tact and
>the interpreting and the elegand on-the-fly restructuring to make it
>sound attractive and desirable.
>
>In some ways I feel that I don't know what to do, but I bet that
>actually I do know. It is all written within me. There is a very hurt,
>hateful, evil, corrupt person inside of me that is attempting to share
>the space with a very weak, fraudulent, pretentious, kind and
>attractive identity. None of them ever dare to look at the other. And
>now I think I have birthed a third.
>
>I always associate with the light person. The dark person I always
>think of as other. Maybe both have precicely the same qualities but it
>only appears to the contrary. There are illusions about seperation
>that I have yet to work through. Every hatred that `I' feel about the
>dark side makes it the hating thing that it is, and every hatred that
>the `I' feels about the light side makes the light side what it is. So
>there are two `I's. I did not expect this. I have always looked to
>philosophies that only have one I and I have always thought that the
>otherness was the only evil. It is closer to home.
>
>I went onto an IRC channel recently and I said that I felt I was evil.
>They diregarded it and kicked me off. Apparently I was playing games.
>I was, but at the same time I didn't want to be. There is so much
>contradiction. I have to learn to love the darker side and accept that
>it is right inside of `me' the lighter side, and to realise that `I'
>am the darker side and that the lighter identity that usually thinks
>it is the observer is the `other' that normally appears identityless.
>
>I think this is true for everyone but this is my own personal
>nightmare. There are two of me and that bothers me. Being introduced
>to this fact is not a very pleasant thing. Probably there is already
>rejection in suggesting that the darker side is the other. The lighter
>side of me is just as bad. All of it, these two identities, the split,
>the conflict, the relationship, the dis-ease, the hatred and the lust,
>the extreme weakness and extreme strength, the violence and the
>enforced peace, is all _here_.
>
>Although I am talking about myself I hope that I am letting you in. I
>think that is the way now.
>
>--
>Paul.
>
>IRC: #amiga, Dalnet: #blitz
>WWW: http://www.stationone.demon.co.uk
>E-M: paulATnospamstationone.demon.co.uk
>
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 1998 15:44:58 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Debora A. Orf" <dorf01ATnospammail.win.org>
To: Paul <paulwestATnospamstationone.demon.co.uk>
cc: kundalini-lATnospamexecpc.com, kundalini-lATnospamlists.execpc.com
Subject: Re: gurus
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.3.96.980903154209.19801A-100000ATnospamwinc0>
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On 3 Sep 1998, Paul wrote:
>
> You are asking for something very complicated. You need three whole
> questions in order to cover the bases?

<SARCASM>

well d'oh, its not an easy question with not an easy answer.

i *could* have complicated it.

like, i was opening up a *discussion* ok?

</SARCASM>

yours,

--jt
Date: Thu, 03 Sep 1998 17:43:37 -0400
From: Barbara Alexander <nickynoodleATnospamnetrax.net>
To: Paul <paulwestATnospamstationone.demon.co.uk>
CC: kundalini-lATnospamexecpc.com
Subject: Re: The shadow
Message-ID: <35EF0D89.F0DD018ATnospamnetrax.net>

Negative emotions such as anger and hatred originate from the limbic
system/reptillian brain.
Negative emotions originate from fear and our response to it.
Fear is related to fear of loss. Loss of what? Security? Life? Self
esteem?
Perhaps if you get to the root of the problem you could then work outward
from it to see how the mind has taken the original fear and rationalize
and justified behaviors to hide the fear or offer you a sense of being
safe
As we move towards understanding fear begins to fall away.
   Good luck.
  BA
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 1998 17:53:34 EDT
From: SvnElvn972ATnospamaol.com
To: paulwestATnospamstationone.demon.co.uk, kundalini-lATnospamexecpc.com
Subject: Re: Enforced spirituality
Message-ID: <5a338760.35ef0fdeATnospamaol.com>

Hi Y'all!

I have to agree with Paul. I'm new to the list this week, and with all due
respect, I've found this "bickering" not to be in the Spirit which I thought
this list would evoke. I'm one for sure who would rather read and share
"positive energies!"

Preston
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 1998 18:01:11 -0400 (EDT)
From: Andrew Alcott Shaver <ashaverATnospamumich.edu>
To: Paul <paulwestATnospamstationone.demon.co.uk>
cc: kundalini-lATnospamexecpc.com, kundalini-lATnospamlists.execpc.com
Subject: Re: The shadow
Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.3.95.980903175357.17499A-100000ATnospammoonpatrol.rs.itd.umich.edu>
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Paul-
 Fritz Perls' Gestalt Therapy has excellent ideas for
dealing with characters and aspects of one's dreams. The basic
schema is to have 2 chairs and to have a conversation back and
forth between them as "yourself" and then as the dream figure.
It's easier if you have a good therapist to facilitate it,
but you're a smart fellow and are on the right track.
You can get to the bottom of the conflict.

Andy

On 3 Sep 1998, Paul wrote:

> I had a dream in the night in which there was blackness and not
> visible form. I experienced with my consciousness what was there. The
> blackness assisted in isolating the problem and seeing it with fresh
> awareness, in contrast. It was part of me. I was me. This person that
> stood in front of me was filled with an immense hatred, anger,
> aggression, stubbornness, violence, disgust and offence. This person
> to me was the projection of hatred, like an embodiment of it, but it
> was as if a piece of jigsaw to which whatever was left of me was the
> matching piece.
>
> The person kicked me very hard in the stomach in an act of apparently
> unreasoned violence. It hurt, and it woke me up with a start, and I
> could feel this injury, an actual experience of it in my body. Not to
> the same extent but it was definately there. For the first several
> hours of today this person was inside of me. I think it has always
> been, but only today have I looked at it or dared aknowledge it.

blank
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