The Death of the Shadow

Recently my sister gave me an article written in a weekly magazine that the El Convento Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico printed back in 1963. The little magazine was titled The San Juan Diary published once a week. It was chock full of ads (more ads than print copy!) primarily advertising for entertainers, restaurants, cocktail bars, cigarettes, booze, and local venues for a wide variety of attractions playing throughout 1960’s San Juan.

My family lived in Puerto Rico from 1960 to 1964—my dad was in the US Navy and was stationed there. I was a little kid, with one sister in high school and the other only 3 years ahead of me. Although we lived on the US Naval base, we were all rather familiar with the theatre life of the city. My mother was an actress and performed in numerous plays at the local Tapia theatre in downtown San Juan.

My oldest sister too was following in my mother’s thespian footsteps. This is the reason this sort of magazine survived through the years (over 60 of them!) and ended up in little brother’s hands (there is an article on Cuba in this issue that was of interest because I am writing my own article on Puerto Rico’s Caribbean neighbour).

Looking through this 60-year-old magazine I was struck by its rather cavalier “attitude.” Why I would think ads about entertainment, booze, and cigarettes were cavalier also struck me as odd. I cannot easily explain this, but there was a feeling of freedom surging through me from these pages, an excitement of a time when no one was excessively worried about taking risks, particularly little ones.

People found this variety of human activity appealing, and exhilarating. There were ads of black entertainers performing at some trendy bar in downtown San Juan (in 1963!), ads of exotic bands playing here and there, and ads about fashionable restaurants where you could dance and dine under the stars in their open-air venues until the sun came up. I know, very subtle things, but you would not find such things in a modern magazine, you just wouldn’t—not in this style. It was visceral, exotic, and erotic.

It got me thinking about the human condition in “developed” countries (I do not think you can make the same assessments commenting on countries where its population is shot at every day). What is this current, almost fanatical, obsession with “safety”? I don’t mean only physical safety, although we certainly can start this discussion there.

Climbing trees when a kid, going on long walks barefooted, playing with lawn darts, swimming in the local creek or pond, discovering the mysteries of local caves, playing with bees, grasshoppers and praying mantids, riding your bike until the streetlights came on with no care or thought as to where you went during the sunny hours. Being captivated by mystery, danger and curiosity.

This is just a tiny, tiny, example of things kids did back in the day.

What about adults? Similar examples for those of us entering adulthood during freer, less “safe,” times, but with a more mature sophisticated twist—taking long romantic drives along the beach in the moonlight, listening to jazz in a smoky bar in the “black” district of the city, watching a new play by a subversive rebel, going to a rock concert on someone’s farm with 10,000 other ardent fans.

We LIVED back then.

No, I am not longing for the years when we drove drunk, or treated women and minorities disrespectfully. There have always been sensible limits to our “freedoms” and to our expression. But we were not obsessed with avoiding risk, avoiding possible pain as a consequence of our actions. We were curious, we ventured forth into the world with a certain amount of bravery and profound interest in what we would find.

Sure, sometimes things did not turn out all that well. Sometimes we got hurt, and sometimes we even got killed, but these potential dangers were not always on our mind. If we keep on the track we are currently on, it will end with everyone staying in their house, or in a plastic bubble, until it is time to die.

Metaphorically we could say that we used to be more comfortable dancing a bit with the devil—always confident we would beat him at his own game. If we never dance with him, we will never develop the skills to outsmart him.

We can also look at this obsession with safety as a suppression of the shadow. Carl Jung, the eminent Swiss psychologist of yesteryear, suggested that we all contain a shadow, both individually and collectively. His goal of individuation was designed to not suppress the shadow, but instead to integrate it. Dancing with the shadow (the devil) is the only way to integrate it properly.

If you suppress it or attempt to kill it, then all it will do is find another way to secretly express itself—without you having control. Quite obviously, you cannot actually kill it, but you can try.

Humans have a built-in propensity to face danger, excitement, and adventure. This is obvious when observing how humans throughout history have never been able to stay put, gallivanting around the world looking for something new to get into. We like to be surprised, like to take chances, and like to hone our skills developed to face the unknown and see how well we can manage a challenge.

The shadow is not in the thing itself, but rather in the fear surrounding it, the danger, the possibility of suffering if things go “bad.”

I know I would much rather walk on a path in the woods that has not been immaculately maintained and covered in asphalt. I don’t want to be assured of my safety. I don’t want to die either, but that obsessive fear has also developed in me over decades of brainwashing. I think humans of the past were constantly putting themselves in harm’s way with little concern for death. Why? I really can’t say, unless it is simply a built-in human trait that results in a more integrated and well-rounded human being.

It seems the agenda is dead set on making us believe we should avoid the shadow at all costs, rather than integrate with its challenges. Is this an agenda goal, or is it simply natural human evolution? I think it is a bit of both. If humans are brainwashed into believing nearly everything they confront in life is a threat—either physically, emotionally, psychologically, or morally—then they will become that much easier to frighten.

If our world is flattened out to be 100% “safe” (or as close to 100% as possible) then if the agenda wants to scare us into compliance or submission, it takes nearly nothing to do so. Part of the point in dancing with fear is to become desensitized to it. Not so much so that we ignore it, but enough so that we do not collapse when facing it. And fear is also not the driving force that may put us at risk, curiosity and intrigue are. Fear is what we actually lose when confronting risky situations.

This reasoning does not only apply to physical threats (such as with a “pandemic”) but with societal and psychological threats, such as bigotry, racism or “homophobia.” If we have been so thoroughly “flattened” with regard to “sensitivity” to racism, for example, then we can all effectively be called racists with even a simple, and innocuous, reference to race. We see this obviously happening everywhere. Apply this idea to other aspects of human community living. Tolerance to things that could be construed as “unsafe” diminishes to nearly nothing. Whereas, during earlier times, it took quite a bit to get someone agitated and riled up.

Although much that I observed in my little magazine from San Juan of 1963 seems subtle, it had great impact. I could feel the freedom, and “unsafeness” in those pages. The ads were titillating, evocative, and were presented with a degree of abandon. Isn’t being a human being supposed to be exciting?