The following is a transcript taken from a recent Integral Spiritual Center conference call between Ken and Arthur Gillard, discussing Chapter Six (Shadow/Disowned Self) of Integral Spirituality.  These calls with Ken take place every other week, and are open to all Integral Spiritual Center members. See http://isc.integralinstitute.org for more details!

Transcribed by Arthur Gillard

Ken Wilber: How are you, buddy?

Arthur Gillard: Good, good. How are you doing?

Ken: Yeah, good, good - we're bouncing right along here. So, well let's go into some of the “shadow stuff of the shadow stuff”. You want to maybe read your questions? Because they're all really good.

Arthur: OK. First question: Although it may be a good introductory process to work with the shadow, do you think that the 3-2-1 process might be too superficial - specifically too cognitive or intellectually focused to really do deep shadow work? In working with linguistic manipulations - for example saying or writing in words the different perspectives - we may not get to the problem in a very deep way. We may even think we have dealt with the shadow because we've talked about it or around it, but the shadow may remain in place or assume different forms.

Ken: Yeah, we covered some of this tangentially last time, and the two things you have to remember about the way we present the 3-2-1 shadow work process - and that is that it's just first grade, I mean it's just a very introductory piece. What we're actually trying to do is find a way - in a sense it's sort of like Big Mind process with Genpo; Genpo found a way that, really in about an hour you can have an authentic and very genuine satori experience, whereas normally that would take you about five years. And it's the same with 3-2-1 process; in about fifteen minutes to a half hour we can get people very much in touch with some of their shadow stuff - but that doesn't mean that therefore that's it. With Big Mind process, for example, you have to really get into it, you've got to plan on five years at least practicing it, and practicing it with a teacher like Genpo. It's the same thing with 3-2-1 work - it's meant to give a very authentic, very real, sometimes very profound experience of one's shadow, and certainly help one spot it. And I'm not sure which - there are many different teachers of it, and different ones give different emphasis to it - but the process is that you're supposed to find it, face it. “Talk to it” just means that's the way you start - it's to get you to actually confront the thing and start to take its perspective. But you're supposed to not just talk to it, you're supposed to feel it; and the depth of the shadow work, its effectiveness, is how deeply you feel it. Obviously if you're just sort of chatting about it, that can be of course used to defend against it. So basically I say that it's find it, face it, talk to it - means resonate with it - and then feel it, be it; you feel it by being it and you be it by feeling it. So that's the measure of whether it's succeeded or not.

And then as for it being introductory, yeah it's just first grade - and a lot of people blame first grade for not being college, and that's just kind of silly. I would say that for people shadow work, even if really effective stuff like 3-2-1 to get you started, you're really talking at least six months working with a teacher usually to really get into that, although you can do an enormous amount on your own if you are serious about it by using 3-2-1. But the whole point about repression and a blind spot is that you really can't see what you can't see; and repression is just dedicated to finding clever ways for you to continue not seeing it. That's sort of the whole point; if it was easy, nobody would have a shadow hardly. But really, really repressed material is really down there.

One of the things that's great about shadow work is it doesn't just have you say, feel into your feelings, get in touch with feelings, how do you feel about it, etc. It actually takes the opposite of how you feel and says “OK, feel that.” Because that's pretty much what your shadow is, is the opposite of what you're consciously aware of. So as I say, using the monster example again, if you are out of touch with your aggression, your anger - and, incidentally, for Buddhists to say, “well, you're never supposed to feel anger,” the point it, well, if you're unconsciously feeling it, you have to consciously feel it first, and then you can try to transcend it or transmute it - but for you to just go around saying, “I'm not going to feel anger now,” that just seals your repression. So the worst possible thing you can do if you have repressed negatives like anger or aggression is to get caught up in one of those practices that say that aggression is the root of all evil because your shadow loves that kind of stuff.

So what you do then is: the monster shows up in your dream, your projected anger shows up in your dream as this monster that's trying to attack you, and what you feel is fear; so we don't say get in touch with your fear - I mean you can if you want to, but it's an inauthentic emotion. [laughs] We say identify with the monster, feel the monster, now what does the monster want to say? The monster is not afraid of you, I assure you. [laughs] You're not going to feel fear, you're going to feel, “I hate you so much I want to kill you” or “I'm so angry at you I could rip your head off” or something like that. So that's the way that you can - to some degree, on your own, and at least as a sort of introduction/initiation into it - you can get a sense of your shadow, because it's really helping you feel almost the opposite of what you think you're feeling. Like I say, just feeling your feelings and getting in touch with your feelings and all that, that won't get you in touch with your shadow, because your shadow is the opposite of what you feel, and that's just a pretty good definition of what the shadow is - the opposite of what you're consciously feeling.

So for all those reasons it's just what it does and again, much like Big Mind, you can just do it initially and get in touch with it but you're going to need to deepen it. And what we do also is if we're really doing any sort of overall unconscious work, then we also recommend equivalent things, like psychodrama is one example where you really are extending your capacity to take roles of other feelings and perspectives and identify with those, and we really like bioenergetic work and that sort of accompanies this so there's a whole lot of stuff that we would do. But the amazing thing about the 3-2-1 process is that really in about 15 or 20 minutes you can nail parts of your shadow and really get that they're there and that's one of the reasons it can be very useful.

Arthur: Hmm. OK.

Ken: OK?

Arthur: It seems like it can be kind of hard, if you feel fear of something it can be difficult to tell what exactly it is you're feeling afraid of. You know what I mean? If it's a monster in a dream you can tell maybe what the characteristics of the monster are, but I've had this weird experience where it feels like I may be on the [verge] of some sort of spiritual, causal or nondual state, and I have a kind of undifferentiated dread and I recoil, and whatever it is I'm on the verge of going into, I push that away. So how would you…

Ken: Well, that's probably not your shadow - you're just getting in touch with the primary mood of the separate self, and the self-contraction just is a feeling of suffering and a feeling of fear, that's just sort of all it is; and so there's no specific shadow content to that. If you're just on the verge of entering a causal or a nondual state the fear is just fear of dying, it's just fear of death. It's with specific content elements that the shadow 3-2-1 process is meant to work, but there are all sorts of other negative emotions and so on that don't really have this specific type of shadow content, and so 3-2-1 wasn't meant to cover those and wouldn't cover that.

Arthur: Sure, OK. Well, just as an aside though, how would you recommend dealing with something like that?

Ken: Dealing with the fear?

Arthur: Yeah, that kind of fear.

Ken: A couple of things. One is - and it also just depends on whether you're working with a teacher or a therapeutic pal or whether you're kind of doing it on your own - but the standard rule for any of these negative feelings is to first give awareness to the resistance to feeling the negative feeling, and then give attention to the feeling. So if it is that you might start by just - do you have a meditation practice? Let me ask that first.

Arthur: Um… [nervous, self-deprecating laughter]

Ken: That's OK! I mean, just…

Arthur: Sometimes, yeah, I…it's something that sort of comes and goes. Lately what I've been doing is some counting breath meditation when I go to bed and when I wake up in the morning.

Ken: OK.

Arthur: But at various times, like I've done Vipassana for periods of time and I've done…

Ken: So you did do Vipassana?

Arthur: Yeah, I've done a couple of 10-day retreats and I've…

Ken: OK, well that's good because I think in this regard, in any event, I pretty strongly agree with the Nyingmapas that in the nine jnana system, the nine vehicle system, or the nine levels of practice or stages of practice, that the foundational one is really Vipassana/Shamatha, because it's just such a fundamental practice of training the mind; and you really do have to be able to concentrate, you have to be able to reach what's called “access concentration,” which more-or-less means being able to keep your mind on an object for 5 minutes without totally losing it. And so counting breaths is certainly one way to develop that, and if you've also done ten-day retreats in Vipassana then you've trained the capacity for simple awareness and that's a really foundational practice.

So the two things that you want to work with when you feel this sort of non-differentiated dread is first of all that's gold - it's not something that you want to get rid of, it's something that sort of holds the whole secret. So first there might be some resistance, so you want to just be aware of or just feel into the resistance you would have - and often if the negative emotion is fear, then it all just runs into the same thing: my resistance is fear and I'm afraid of fear, so that's what I'm afraid of. [both laugh] It just sort of gets circled around on itself. But you want to just breathe into and whole-bodily feel fear, and you might actually get a kind of a paradoxical intention going by saying I'm going to at least attempt to really, really increase this fear. And for the next five minutes or so I don't want to let go of this fear, and if at all possible I'm going to increase it. And actually try to do that. And that's another version of - if there [are] any shadow elements in it, paradoxical intentionality helps you get in touch with those because again your shadow is pretty much the opposite of what you're feeling. So a shadow element would be some part of you that is inducing fear and gets something out of it; but in any event you want to just try to increase it, because you are generating these feelings of fear but you don't know how you're doing it. Fritz Perls used to say it's like somebody coming in and they're pinching themselves, and you can see them pinching themselves, but all they tell you is, “I've got a pain here, it hurts.” And you say, “Well, stop pinching yourself!” “I'm not pinching myself!” [both laugh] And you go, “OK, try to make the pain worse.” In other words, if you can see that you're producing the pain of pinching, once you see that you're doing it, you won't ask how to stop. You'll just stop! Because it's a voluntary movement, it's like once you see that you've got your hand in the air, you can put it down.

Arthur: Sure. Well, that makes sense. I guess from what you're saying it's kind of an intrinsic thing that's there, this kind of fear. Because what I have felt in the past when that has happened is that I have to figure out some way of going into that state without being afraid.

Ken: Right.

Arthur: But you're saying that that's intrinsically going to be there because of the fear of the separate self that comes up?

Ken: Yeah, that's part of it, and also the idea that I'm going to go into it without being afraid - again, that makes a certain kind of sense, except that's actually in this case often what's causing the problem, because you want to say, “No, actually I'm going to try to feel afraid.” You're going to assume responsibility for your feeling and to say - if it's some other negative emotion, it's OK to say, well, I'm going to try to go into feeling anger or feeling sexual passion or something without fear, and that usually is OK, because it just helps you actually be open to feeling the anger, and you can just say I'm going to try to increase anger, I'm going to actually get into it - but with fear it doubles back on itself, and to say “I'm going to try not to be afraid of fear”, is already to - that's the problem, you're already trying not to be afraid, so what you want to do is try to increase it and actually feel “can I in any way increase this, can I actually assume responsibility for this, and just step into it, and feel this fear with a vengeance?” And sometimes you can only do it for a short amount of time.

But what tends to happen and different contemplative traditions have different ways to deal with negative emotions and what they transmute into, but most of them have some version - because it really doesn't matter exactly what the exact correlations are, but the point is that when you're working with these fundamental emotions of the separate self - and fear is just the primary mood of the separate self - and it's not that the separate self is feeling something called fear, it's that when you feel the separate self all you're really feeling is fear and the suffering that goes with that. So they're not two different things, the self-contraction itself is the process of pain and fear and suffering. But if you have anger, for example, in Vajranana to give one example, if you go into anger and you just really step right into it, try to increase it, certainly give awareness to it, then at some point when the separate self relaxes, then that anger dissolves into clarity, into nondual luminous clarity. And passion can dissolve into nondual compassion, and envy can dissolve into equality because in a sense now you have it all, so there's a great equalizing awareness that sort of tends to occur. And pride, one of the versions of that is that if you go into that it can be experienced as all-accomplishing because now when you're one with everything, then you're proud of everything, it's completely equalized in that sense. And with fear, then generally that tends to go into a kind of Emptiness itself, because basically that's what happens is when the separate self dissolves then there's nobody to feel the fear, there's just fear arising, and so there's nobody to be afraid, there's nothing outside of you that is going to crash into you and there's nothing outside of you that you can want. So when you're resting as all-pervading presence or Big Mind/Big Heart or whatever version you're used to working with, then as fear arises it's just actually energy of Openness because there's simply nothing there. As you say, fear doesn't usually have an object - you can be afraid of almost everything.

Arthur: [inaudible]

Ken: It is, and like you say, it's sort of like a non-specific dread - which I think is a really good definition of what the separate self is always feeling. And the only reason it doesn't feel that all the time is, it puts other objects in there quickly. So it puts desires in place or specific anxieties or specific anger or so on and so it doesn't feel this primary fear. But fear is the primary mood of the self, and it's something that in a sense when you move through that you've also moved through the self. So transcending your own self and transcending that fear are pretty much the same step.

Arthur: OK, a related sub-question is that - you know, most people seem to think that if you go into a non-dual state that everything is perfectly OK, but I've heard some people describe going to non-dual states and having horrific experiences even though there was no separate self to experience it.

Ken: Yeah. Well, both are true in a certain sense. Most nondual states can start anyway with, it's just whatever is arising is arising but there's no witness; and so that can start with - you can be in great states of fear or great anger or great pleasure and then all of a sudden it's just whoof! and you're no longer there, there's just whatever states that are arising. And sometimes that can be, indeed, because you're not resisting what's arising there are aspects of it that can be quite horrific; but as you stay in the nondual state more and more, then specifically the negative emotions generated by “pinching yourself”, or generated by the self-contraction, those tend to arise less and less, and so that's where the other side of the argument comes in: well, actually everything is hunky-dory and wonderful and everything - and that's not quite true, but that's where that comes from, is that there's a kind of “abiding OKness” underneath whatever surface stuff is arising. And the surface stuff can sometimes be pretty horrific, but that sort of “freedom from” any negative or positive just becomes increasingly palpable.

Arthur: Alright. So, yeah. [laughs] So there's no way to really avoid that fear, it's just going into it.

Ken: Yeah, at the beginning, yeah exactly. It might be that if you're doing something like Big Mind process, and I would certainly recommend trying that - if you haven't you can get CDs of it, you can download it from Integral Naked website, and Roshi's website and so on. Some people will actually get their first taste of Big Mind without really going into fear or anger or anything like that, because they just get an experience of it in Big Mind process. So you can go into it without necessarily exploring fear. But one of the things that will tend to happen is that you're in Big Mind and you're just resting in it, it's just completely obvious - not as an object, but as an atmosphere basically. You also realize it's something you've been aware of from the beginning - that there's only one constant feeling, if you will, and that's the feeling of presence, the simple feeling of being, or Big Mind and so on - and so once you sort of get an entryway that way, at some point you will also usually notice - although some people just sort of click into it fairly permanentlyish - but mostly people fall into it and then find they've fallen out of it. And if you look at what keeps you in and what keeps you out, the primary affective tone is fear, it's just flat-out that fear of dread, and when you are as the separate self, that's what you are, and it's fear of just letting go of that feeling of self; because that is a death experience.

You certainly hear zen masters say, people all the time they hear Emptiness and they're afraid of it because they think they're going to die, and they go “well, they are!” But it's not nearly as bad as you'd think - even though the state itself is without any qualities whatsoever, there are a lot of positive emotions right on the outside of it, so things like bliss or joy, that kind of thing, happiness, certainty - not in a fixed way, but just in the total obviousness of what your condition is; and even if certain really rotten things are happening on the surface, you're more open to those, because there's nothing really to repress them. So there's a whole past life, at the very least, of karma that in a sense you need to digest, and so that's going to be coming up and that's fine. It's better to experience that in Big Mind than it is as self.

This sort of free-floating dread, if people are honest it's a very common feeling because as I say, it's the primal mood of the separate self-sense, the self-contraction. And so you can even just sit down and using essentially techniques of Vipassana; or people that haven't done that, a capacity to just sit down and just, for the next five minutes either try to increase it or at the very least you agree that you don't want the fear to go away for at least five minutes, and that already switches the tone of what's happening. But it's serious, you really want it to not go away for five minutes, and then basically your job is to videotape it, and you're there to do a photo-essay on dread, and so you want [to see] how big is it, what size is it, what shape is it, how much does it weigh, where is it in my body exactly located, and it's just, you're there to do a photo-essay on it.

Arthur: OK. So you're taking a witnessing stance to it, in other words?

Ken: Basically.

Arthur: OK. So the feeling of free-floating dread is getting to something really important?

Ken: Yes. It's a Geiger-counter, and when the Geiger-counter goes off, you know if you're searching for uranium [and] the Geiger-counter goes off, most people turn around and run in the other direction when the Geiger-counter goes off because you found the gold!

Arthur: Right. Yeah, well that's been my reaction. The best I've done is to try to just be with it for periods of time, but my impulse is to run away. [laughs]

Ken: Yeah, I know. So basically in a sense what I'm saying is, because of fear, it's right there whichever way you turn. One of the things you start with is: OK, I'm going to really feel into running away, and what does that feel like? OK I'm really going to run from it, and what am I actually doing - what do I do when I run, what's my nature, am I just going to watch something else? I'm going to watch a movie, I'm going to go out, I'm going to get drunk, or what is it? What am I going to do?

Arthur: So look at what you do to avoid it as well?

Ken: Well, certainly if that's what's coming up, yes. You can choose to do them at different times and you can say, “well, this time I'm just going to be aware of the avoidance mechanism,” “this time, I'm going to try to be aware of what's under it” but again, one of the things that I'm trying to convey about fear is that the avoidance of the negative emotion is the same as the negative emotion - so, like I say, if it was anger, a lot of people are afraid of anger, and so you want to say, “well try to be with anger without fear” - but with fear you can't do that because the avoidance mechanism is also fear so fear is everywhere you look! But just see which different forms you have and if you're running, just see how fast you can run, what that feels like, and then when you sort of get centered down, then at some point [get] to feeling the dread itself, it's just that you really want to try to increase it on the one hand, or at the very least just do a photo-essay on it - and you really want to say “I am absolutely going to be able to describe this from ten different perspectives” and “where is it located in my body?” Start there.

Arthur: OK, that's great, that's really helpful.

Ken: Good!

Arthur: Just to finish the first question, in terms of going deeper you mentioned a number of different techniques like bioenergetics, etc. What are the ones that you find are most helpful for people in terms of going deeper into the shadow process?

Ken: I think there are two things, but again I sometimes hesitate to do this because there are a lot of really good things out there - and so if I'm not mentioning those it doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of really good things, because there are - but there's sort of two components that you want to look at at a minimum. One is preverbal stuff and one is verbal stuff. For a lot of the preverbal stuff, any of the bioenergetics is really pretty good work, and there's a lot of different schools of that, but one of the ones that started the movement was Alexander Lowen's work - and I think you can still get a lot of his books - but it's also developed into a lot of different forms. But one of the reasons it's good is it sort of associates both healthy emotions and unhealthy emotions with different areas and activities of the body, and it's a very good way to help people really ground and embody the shadow work using shadow in the general sense.

Another one that deals with the verbal components, which I think is really quite good is Transactional Analysis. Just even reading a few of Eric Berne's books on Games People Play - just because there's only a handful, people are still playing them, and they're usually games that were learned when the rule/role mind was being laid down. Emotional stuff is usually in ages three to five to seven, or earlier, and then the verbal stuff, the dysfunctional stuff, is usually laid down from ages seven to twelve. So those are good. And for just one, if you're just going to pick one therapy, Gestalt therapy probably does it as well as anybody.

Arthur: OK, great. Oh, and one other minor clarification question. When you're talking about, in terms of transforming emotions into their positive opposites, what is a good book to read about that?

Ken: Instead of just a particularly good book, I would recommend just using the Tibetan tradition, and you can go on amazon and start following up the leads, but there's one I believe - I don't know if it actually has the title - of “five dakinis,” “dakini energy” - and it's working with the five Buddha families. And Trungpa's written a lot of excellent stuff on that, and there are probably a dozen, at least, books that are really, really quite good with those. And I think Irini Rockwell, she actually has a school that focuses on the five Buddha families and the five energies that go with them, and the transmutations and the five wisdoms.

Arthur: OK. So do you know any particular thing that deals with it from a more Western perspective, because I find a lot of the particularly Buddhist stuff a little hard to relate to sometimes.

Ken: Yeah, I know what you mean. None that's gone into it as well, and a lot of the books, like Rockwell, you'll find are Americans and they've made it much more accessible. So that's where I would stop. And we're going to present actually an auxiliary ILP kit on transmuting emotions and so we'll be presenting all of our final recommendations on that when we do that kit, probably a year or so from now.

Arthur: Great, OK, looking forward to that!

Ken: Yeah.