Understanding Your Dark Side – Alan Watts

if you are perfectly honest about loving yourself and you don't pull any punches you don't pretend that you were anything other than exactly what you are you suddenly come to discover that the self you love if you really go into it is the universe you don't like all of it you are selective about it as we saw in the beginning perception is selection but on the whole you love yourself in terms of what is other because it's only in terms of what is other that you have a self at all so then i feel that the group one of the very great things that cg young contributed to mankind's understanding was the concept of the shadow that everybody has a shadow and that the main task of the psychotherapist is to do what he called to integrate the evil to as it were put the devil in us in its proper function because you see it's always the devil the unacknowledged one the outcast the scapegoat the bastard the bad guy you see the black sheep of the family it's always from that point that which we could call the fly in the ointment you see that generation comes in other words in the same way as in the drama uh to have the play it's necessary to introduce a villain it's necessary to introduce a certain element of trouble so in the whole scheme of life there has to be the shadow because without the shadow that can't be the substance so this is why there is a very strange association between crime and all naughty things and holiness you see holiness is way beyond being good good people aren't necessarily holy people a holy person is one who is whole who has as it were reconciled his opposites and so there's always something slightly scary about holy people and other people react to them in very strange ways they can't make up their minds whether they're saints or devils and so holy people have throughout history always created a great deal of trouble along with their creative results which hate jesus for example trouble that jesus created is absolutely incalculable think of the crusades the inquisition the heaven only knows what's going on in the name of jesus very remarkable freud's a big troublemaker as well as a great healer you see it all goes together so the holy person is scary because he is like the earthquakes or better and still he's like the ocean see the ocean on a lovely sunny day and say oh isn't that gorgeous and you can go into it and relax and float around but boy when the storm comes does that thing get mad and terrifying so there is in us the ocean you see and jung felt that the whole point was to bring the two together and uh by a kind of a fantastic honesty penetrate one's own motivations to the depths the only had a tremendous humor and he knew that nobody can be completely honest that you will try and you'll have a great deal of success in exploring your motivations and your dark unconscious depths [Music] but there will be a certain point at which you will say well i've had enough of that [Laughter] do you see how in a strange way there's a certain sanity in that when a person indulges in a certain kind of duplicity of deception there is something you all laughed when i said that there was something humorous about it and this humor is very funny thing basically humor is an attitude of laughter about oneself there is malicious humor or which is laughing at other people but real deep humor is laughter at oneself now why fundamentally do you laugh about yourself what makes you laugh about yourself isn't it because you know that there is a big difference between what goes on the outside and what goes on the inside that if i hint you see that your inside is the opposite of your outside it makes people laugh if i don't do it unkindly if i get up in the attitude of a preacher and say uh you're a bunch of miserable sinners and you ought to be different nobody laughs [Laughter] but if i say well after all boys will be boys and girls or the girls we all know then then people laugh now you see what's what's happening when we do that now i passed you around a lot of embroidery to look at before we started and i'm perfectly sure that you've got the point that there's a big difference between the front and back in some forms of embroidery the back is very different from the front because people take shortcuts in the front everything is orderly and it is supposed to be kind of messy on the back side see which side will you wear you've got to be sure you get the front in front have the back in the back the back has all the little tricks in it all the shortcuts all the low down that people don't acknowledge see and it's exactly the same with the way we live [Music] you know like sweeping the dust under the carpet in a hurry just before the guests come i mean we do ever so many things like that and if you don't do it if you don't think you do it and you think well really my embroidery is the same on both sides see well you're deceiving yourself because what you're doing is you're taking the shortcuts in another dimension which you're keeping out of consciousness everybody takes the shortcuts everybody plays tricks everybody has in himself an element of duplicity of deception because you see from this point of view that i am discussing where the web is the trap to be is to deceive