melatonin said:
Im finding it very readable and understandable for myself. Only problem is that (as so far), there are no explanations for how to actively own you "dark side". This seems to be a flaw of the book according to some reviews ive just read.
It's interesting because the concepts that are capturing your interest at the moment all have something to do with not acknowledging our inner states, drives, thoughts, feelings etc. Is this something that you're personally having a problem with at the moment?
'Integrating' the 'dark side' is another thing that ties into it: acknowledgement, I mean.
Passive-aggressiveness is the easiest example to discuss. We might think of our 'dark-side' as our
capacity or
potential for force, for anger, for violence. It is something that is always there and always in us, but if we don't 'integrate it into our personality', it'll come out some way, at some time.
The problem of being passive aggressive is related to agreeableness. How much and for how long we are willing to accept an unfair situation or let someone encroach on our boundaries. If we feel like we do not have a voice, a say, a right to protest, then our anger, bitterness, resentment will grow and it will start to pervade and saturate our personality. Our aggression is palpable to others, but we're too afraid to just come out and say what is wrong and discuss the problem. Our anger
owns us.
If we accept that we are angry, that we have the potential to be angry at someone, to resent them, to even wish harm on them for what they're doing or saying, we might call forth the courage to have it out with them and air our grievance. Each time we decide to push back and maintain our boundaries and call people out for behaving in ways toward us that we won't accept, we're getting in touch with our shadow side. If we do this for long enough and consistently enough, then our passive-aggressiveness will reduce over time, to the point where when we've integrated this kind of emotional energy into our personality, it won't rule us anymore, and our overall demeanour in general will reduce the number of instances when people act like that towards us, and when they do, we might even be able to nip it in the bud in a relaxed, even friendly or joking kind of way.
This is what I believe don Juan meant by the term 'impeccability', or what we might be talking about in esoteric Christianity when we're discussing the right use of energy. It's 'conservative' in that we don't waste as much time and energy on things.
So integration is a process of acknowledgement, and then action and application. It's a long process and when we're trying it out, we'll find pitfalls such as over-identifying with the state itself in a kind of righteous way - "I'm going to be more firm with people, and this person is doing something to annoy me and I have every right to feel hurt and angry and to tell them what I think of them!" Then we'll go about the whole situation in a careless way and get burned. And then we'll have learned something from that and we'll try it a bit differently next time. But if the end goal is to not allow our drives to rule our actions, then we need to go about integrating these aspects of ourselves
through action.