Ken Wilber on Waking Up, Cleaning Up, and the Shadow

The deeper contemplative paths tended to survive more fully in the eastern traditions: Zen, Vedanta, Tibetan Buddhism. Religion in the modern west, by contrast, mostly boils down to a set of mythic stories about a gray bearded man on a heavenly throne. That picture explains why so many people now describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. Roughly a quarter of Americans claim the phrase, and one poll put the figure at a startling 75 percent among millennials aged 18 to 25. What they're rejecting, usually, isn't spirituality itself but the childish mythic business of merely growing up. They want something closer to actual waking up.

Waking up names a real territory of human possibility, and any serious composite map of the psyche (call it an integral map, or a psychology built for the future) has to account for it. It's the route by which a person uncovers their own supreme identity, their deepest and most singular self. The same theme turns up in unexpected places. Writers on conscious capitalism argue that contemplative practice and what they call timeless wisdom are necessary for genuine leadership. That's waking up, dressed in business language.

There's a separate discovery, and it belongs to the modern west rather than the east. Freud and the early psychoanalysts worked out that people can deny, repress, and disown parts of themselves. That disowned material, the shadow, doesn't disappear. It gets flung onto other people out in the world, and the person then spends their days either shadow boxing or shadow hugging, carrying around neurotic and sometimes psychotic symptoms that genuinely hurt. Working on that, and ideally resolving it, is what Wilber calls cleaning up.

One study makes the pattern vivid. Men who had built their lives around opposing gay rights, frequently out of fundamentalist mythic conviction, were shown homosexual erotica and measured for arousal. They registered more arousal than the average straight man. They had buried their own desires, projected them onto gay men, and then tried to be rid of the desire by being rid of the people. Textbook shadow boxing.

That's the work cleaning up takes on. A large share of the monsters human beings chase and fight in the outer world are nothing but their own projected shadows, and the only thing that ends that kind of conflict is to take the shadow back and make it part of yourself again.