The Secret of living a fulfilled life: Living a life of wholeness by transcending duality such as good and evil, positive and negative.
After a spiritual awakening, we need to accept our humanness and imperfections instead of waiting to be enlightened all the time. If we are just displaying our newfound divinity with people, ego its latching on to our awakening and playing trick on us.
Tale of two shadows: Dark and Golden Shadow
Lets understand the tale of two shadows. The shadow is composed of everything you have chosen to exclude from your conscious life. Shadow is the qualities you hide from the world. We all have a dark shadow and a golden shadow; both are necessary for our well-being.
Dark shadows are the qualities like envy, hatred, anger, compulsiveness, etc. Golden shadows are the qualities like inherent calmness, spirituality, honesty, courage, creativity, etc.
Our mind projects a dark shadow onto others, blaming “They are the Problem.” And it projects a golden shadow on others, following and loving them, claiming, “They are the Solution.” Both are projections and ways to deny our responsibility for our inner life.
The qualities you love about others are the qualities you love about yourself. The aspects that irritate you about others are the aspects you cannot accept in yourself.
-Aby Vohra
Now, people resist the golden shadow more strenuously than they hide the dark shadow. To draw the skeletons out of the closet is relatively easy, but to discover your noble character in the shadow is terrifying. It is more disrupting and disturbing to find that you have a profound nobility of character than to find out you are a bad person.
Of course, you are noble and dark; but one does not discover these two elements at the same time. The golden shadow is related to our higher calling, and this can be hard to accept at certain stages of life, when you spent your whole life in your mind’s dictated conditioning, impressing the world.
Ignoring the golden shadow can be as damaging as ignoring the dark side of the psyche, and some people may suffer a severe illness or accidents before they learn how to let their noble qualities emerge out. Indeed, this kind of intense experience may be necessary to show us that an important part of our nobility is lying dormant or unused.
In the shadows, there are empowering qualities. It is amazing to know that people’s most common qualities are frequently the ones that are socially acceptable.
In essence, whatever negative tendencies we have are sent to the shadow, but any creative, distinctive, and innovative talents that we have are also sent to the shadow because they are not socially acceptable.
Spiritual Bypassing
It’s not all doom and gloom when it comes to exploring your darkness. In fact, you’ll likely be amazed by the seemingly limitless supply of inventive and unusual qualities you discover that have been hidden for years. This is the entire opposite of many self-denying traditional spiritual methods of suppressing, denying, or religiously disciplining the self.
Spiritual-Bypassing is the avoidance of real-world issues, not facing unresolved emotional issues, and psychological wounds.
Many spiritual seekers believe that as they “awaken to their Higher Selves,” “work through their karma,” or “become more enlightened,” all of their dark shadows would finally be transcended. But if you are just making spiritual liberation as a goal for the future, you are totally missing your beautiful experience of being human in all its imperfections.
In my experience, not dealing with dark shadows of yourself is a type of spiritual bypassing: utilizing spirituality to avoid facing whatever is difficult within us rather than face it with honesty and courage.
Furthermore, facing your dark shadows encourages you to embrace these disjointed aspects of yourself, resulting in greater psychological and spiritual equilibrium (wholeness). Denying your darkness only leads to confusion and discord.
Embracing an aspect of yourself means loving it—allowing it to coexist with all your other aspects, not making it more or less than any other part of yourself.
The word “integration” is derived from the Latin word integratus, which means “to make whole.” Rather than rejecting or denying our inner qualities, integrating it means taking ownership and responsibility for it. Integration has numerous advantages, including sanity, healing, increased compassion, calmness, understanding, and wholeness. Once we accept these dark qualities in us, we accept others wholeheartedly.
Disintegration, on the other hand, is the opposite of integration. It is getting shattered and split into parts. To function correctly, a person who “breaks down” or “falls apart” has been unable to cope with stress and has disregarded far too many of their dark shadow traits. In reality, since they lack wholeness and are constantly interacting with life from the margins of their personality components, a fragmented person will never be able to deal with adversity. Wholeness is crucial since it allows us to live a life of balance.
Stay in center: Transcending Good and evil, postive and negative
The sign of intelligence of a human being is when he functions by having two opposite views in his mind.
– Eckhart Tolle
I have now come to understand the extraordinary importance of leading a life of wholeness. That is, of allowing myself to first observe, then to integrate, all the aspects of who I am—those that I and others have called “good quailities” and those that I and others have called “bad qualities”—into a divine whole.
If you believe that we have the whole of humanity within us, as I do, then you must be capable of being your highest self, and at the same time have the capability of experiencing your lowest self. This post is about making peace with all these sometimes contradictory aspects of yourself.
As one of the enlightened being, Swami Vivekananda says, “The extreme positive and the extreme negative are always similar. When the vibrations of light are too slow, we do not see them, nor do we see them when they are too rapid. So with sound; when very low in pitch, we do not hear it; when very high, we do not hear it either”
What Tao Te Ching Can Teach Us?
Without addressing one of the deepest of all spiritual teachings, the Tao te Ching, no discussion of living life as a spiritual journey is complete. It covers what is hardest to discuss, what Lao-tzu referred to as “the Tao” (pronounced: dow). This literally translates to “the Way.” The Tao is so subtle that one can only talk around the edges of it, never touching it. The entire foundation for all of life’s ideas is spelled down in that treatise. It is an essay on the yin and yang balance, the feminine and masculine, the dark and light, the good and evil.
You’ll discover that you have considerably more energy than you ever anticipated after you stop swinging between opposites. What takes someone else hours to do will take you minutes. What drains other people’s energy will take up very little of your own. That’s the difference between battling opposites and staying centered. This principle applies to all aspects of life. When you’re in balance, you eat when it’s time to eat and in a way that keeps your body healthy. Otherwise, you’ll be wasting energy dealing with the consequences of eating too little, too much, or the wrong things. Basically, you waste tremendous energy at the extremes. The more extreme it is, the more you are out of your shared humanity.
Miracle Arise where the Light and Dark Meets
Every human experience can be expressed in terms of paradox and its balance. A positive and negative electrical charge exists in the electric current. Only in contrast to night does day have any significance. Only in contrast to femininity does masculinity have meaning. Only in relation to rest can activity have any value. Only when there is a down is it possible to get up. Without the south, what would the north be?
Without you, I’m not sure where I’d be.
Right now, two voices are competing for attention within each of us: the voice of reason, a good conscience, and the larger good. And the voice of fear, shame, and greed. Our higher self’s voice vs. our lower self’s voice This is the conundrum, the internal conflict between our humanity’s dark and light sides.
When we can feel Presence of God!
You can be sure that God is present whenever you have a clash of opposite aspects in your nature that refuses to give way to the other (the bush will not be consumed, and the fire will not stop). We despise this experience and try to avoid it at all costs; nevertheless, the unresolved conflict is a direct encounter with God if we can bear it.
Staying in the center and accepting all good and bad aspects in ourselves requires a very high state of awareness. The only responsibility you can take in your life is your state of consciousness. And if you are not conscious, you are paving the road to hell with all your good intentions
– Aby Vohra
Now you might ask how to transform evil into good and dark qualities like anger, envy, jealousy into life-saving tools? This is what I want to talk about in my next post, ” The Ultimate Secret of living a fulfilled life – Part -2″ (Coming Soon)
