Part Five:

A danger facing people whose identities are strongly organised around any belief or ideology is the projection of their own inner shadow in the name of what they believe. Ideology can offer an opportunity to project darkness outward without having to accept responsibility for it. A person begins to imagine that because they believe in something they regard as good, they themselves have become wholly good, beings made of light. At that point, instead of searching for darkness within, they begin searching for it outside themselves and in other people. By projecting their shadow upon others, they divide human beings into good and bad and come to see the “bad” as deserving destruction. Every ideological belief contains the danger of dividing the world, people, nations or races into categories of good and evil and, through projection of the shadow, creating the conditions for violence and crime.

I want once again to invoke a profound passage attributed here to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who himself spent long years in exile and in some of the most brutal prisons:

If only it were so simple that one could draw a line between people, separate those among us who perform evil acts and hold destructive ideas, and by destroying them remove evil from the world forever. But the passage of years has shown me that the boundary dividing good from evil, darkness from light, passes neither between states and governments, nor between social classes, nor between political groups. It passes through the heart of every human being, and even within each heart it moves over time. We cannot expel evil from the external world, but we can recognise it within our own hearts and restrain it there.

Believers in every ideology face the danger that their convictions may never penetrate deeper than the level of the social mask, leaving them blind to the darkness within. Unconsciously, belief itself can become an instrument of insatiable self-admiration. Such shallow belief never moves beyond persona. It closes its eyes to the monster hidden in inner darkness and projects an ever-thickening shadow outward, repeatedly turning “the other” into the victim of the monster within. For how can someone imagine themselves to be the embodiment of goodness and a warrior of light and at the same time possess the courage to look inward and see a destructive monster looking back from the mirror? A person whose belief has never gone deeper than the surface mask of opinion may be willing to pay almost any price to avoid such an encounter, because it could shatter their entire self-image and everything they believe themselves to have been.

The idea that the devil exists somewhere outside human beings is dangerous because it turns our own heart and psyche into the safest possible hiding place for the devil: the place in which we are certain never to search. Many believers look for evil in the depths of everyone else’s soul, point to others with satisfaction and say, “The devil is there,” without seeing how safely it has settled inside themselves.

The devil is never only a stranger outside us. It takes refuge in a fortress within each of us. Jung believed, in the interpretation used here, that each of us must enter the inner struggle and become our own exorcist, hunting the monster within. The world becomes better only as each of us confronts the darkness and shadow within and brings it under restraint.

Look at the suffering of life and the darkness of the world and ask: where do wars, poverty, injustice, loss of freedom and ignorance begin? Every war in the outer world is, in one sense, the consequence of a battle left unfinished within us. Every bondage that imprisons bodily and spiritual freedom reflects forms of unfreedom and captivity within the human spirit that we impose upon our own lives and the lives of others.

The dark alleys and cellars of cities, poverty and injustice, will remain while the dark alleys of our hearts, the poverty and darkness of our minds, and the anger and resentment of our spirits remain. The madness of violence will remain while we stay blind to the darkness within and search for darkness only outside ourselves, in other people and in the external world.