Part Four

The point is that the road into hell is travelled step by step. If we do not take each step of our lives consciously and look at where we are placing our feet, one day we may find ourselves on a level of our inner hell towards which we have walked half-consciously, like sleepwalkers.

Accepting the existence of a shadow in the unconscious means accepting that if something called darkness, evil or Ahriman exists in the external world, this darkness and evil are not alien beings. They begin within each of us and take form in the world outside. We human beings have built the existence of this Ahriman cell by cell, and we sustain its life.

The word Buddha itself means one who has seen truth through all these spectres of truth, whose gaze has passed through every darkness. In the story of the Buddha’s awakening, he first confronts kama, or human desires, and passes beyond them. He then confronts Mara, the embodiment of fear, and passes beyond that as well. Finally he confronts the ultimate temptation, the moral duty towards others, and does not submit to that either. The Buddha’s journey towards enlightenment can be understood as a journey through darkness—like the lotus, which in order to reach the light must pass through the heart of the swamp before turning towards the light and attaining the splendour of blossoming.

Most of us think we know what is wrong with other people and what must be corrected. We think we know what is wrong “out there” and what must be fought. Jung believes this battle must be carried inward, because only by winning this war will the wars outside come to an end. It begins when, for a moment, we stop and accept that everything we see in the outside world and dislike also exists within us—and that this is precisely why we are able to see it.

Our most dangerous error is the projection of our own shadow onto others. This lies at the root of all the violence and wars of our history. That is why the person whose cry rises to the sky—“Ahriman is out there; seize him and kill him”—carries within himself an even larger and more bloodthirsty Ahriman. The person who cannot see his own dark side considers himself the most innocent. Like the Cyclops, the one-eyed monster, he is always certain that he is right and always points the accusing finger towards other people and the enemies of the outside world.

During the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the Nazi German commanders and among the principal organisers of the killings and atrocities at Auschwitz during the Second World War, the British writer, philosopher and scholar of Eastern thought Alan Watts, referring to what he had learned from Jung, said:

I will certainly fight until my last breath against the darkness of the thought that Eichmann represents, but I will never accept that he is the devil or the embodiment of darkness; for I learned from Jung that if I imagine my enemy as the absolute embodiment of darkness and as wholly demonic, I prevent myself from seeing the darkness within myself.

Calling the person who stands against us false inevitably creates the dangerous belief that we are wholly right; and calling the person against whom we fight the devil ultimately leads us into the dangerous delusion that we ourselves are the truth—a delusion that is itself at the root of the fall of people such as Eichmann.

When Eichmann and his commanders called Jews the embodiment of evil and the devil, they opened the way to believing that they themselves embodied light and the struggle against evil. With the clear conscience produced by this self-deception, they told their young soldiers that their ideal was to purify the world of everything impure and demonic, thereby allowing themselves to justify the most horrific crimes.

If we, too, are incapable of seeing the Eichmann and Hitler within ourselves, and doubt that any one of us, in the right time and place for the emergence of our darkness, might become Eichmann, an Auschwitz guard, or an SS soldier carrying out his orders, then the only thing we lack in order to become them is an opportunity to exercise power and violence.

People such as Hitler and Eichmann are caught in the grip of their shadow without knowing anything of their captivity in the hands of this darkness. Hitler believed himself to be the exalted leader of a superior people and race; whatever was separate from him was the darkness that had to be destroyed.

He was able to awaken the shadow of his nation and summon from the depths of the hell of their psyches an immense Ahriman composed of the dark side of each individual among his people. Every nation has a dark side. Leaders who are themselves imprisoned by their inner darkness can awaken that shadow and, through it, deepen the hell of the outer world and strengthen the destructive forces that govern it, without even being aware of what they are doing.