Temptation and the Shadow- a meditation
James 1:19-25
Remember this, my dear brothers: be quick to listen but slow to speak and slow to rouse your temper; God's righteousness is never served by man's anger; do away with all bad habits that are left in you-accept and submit to the word which has been planted in you and can save your souls. But you must do what the word tells you to, and not just listen to it and deceive yourselves. To listen to the word and not obey is like looking at our own features in a mirror and then, after a quick look, going off and immediately forget what you looked like. But the man who looks steadily at the perfect law of freedom and makes that his habit-not listening and forgetting but actively putting it into practice-will be happy in all he does.
We can all find our "Shadow" in the projections we make on others. Usually, if we stop ourselves, we can see the Shadow expressing itself in the complexes revealed in our outbursts. We have become so skilled at hiding the Shadow, the unwanted or unacceptable parts of ourselves that our ego represses, that we do not even see them with conscious effort. In this scripture passage James is asking us to stop ourselves.
Repressing our Shadow selves is the beginning of the complexes that perplex us and usually have us "shooting ourselves in the foot". We are that man who looks in the mirror and forgets what he looks like. Carl Jung's psychology is one of wholeness through the balancing of opposites within the structure of the psyche. Though not religious in it's concepts,they prescribe in a certain manner the interaction of the soul and the mind. Within that structure we hide all of the Shadow material which come out as projections of I and You and Us and Them. It is all we hate in another. Taken collectively this Shadow creates for the world the hatreds, the genocides and the unspeakable horrors of war, all that we venture into as social units.
The "perfect law of freedom" is this: not forgetting what we look like. Looking in the mirror of ourselves and the word and doing two things. Retreating complexes, in other words taking care what we say to others, being slow to speak and slow to anger. And secondly to accept that these "outbursts" are parts of ourselves which once accepted can be reconciled with our egos thus allowing that psychic ( as in 'the mind') energy to to be available for working toward a greater good.
And a greater good is to actively practice the word given to us and do so in full knowledge of the evil we ourselves are capable of. In this practice we give and receive the happiness in what we do.
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