The Creative Shadow

The Axis of Creation (8)

Every light casts its inverse twin in the form of a shadow, and this is true of the experience of “spiritual awakening” no less than of any other fact, phenomenon, or experience in life.

In practical terms, what this means is that, after awakening, the ego often sneaks back into the picture wearing a halo. It begins speaking of “my realization,” and it offers to teach others how to be free as well. The self subtly reshapes around spiritual identity: the “enlightened one” who has seen through illusion, and who now dispenses wisdom from an elevated perch. The performance can elaborate and refine itself until it become flawless.

But, alas, it’s still a performance, still just an act by an “enlightened” influencer who cannot stop performing his own disappearance. Such a person speaks of no-self while building a brand around his public image, and he teaches surrender while carefully managing his reputation. The shadow isn’t obvious to him, and maybe not to others, at least for a time, and maybe for a long time. It’s subtle, seductive, and wrapped in the language of truth. But the act has an inbuilt termination point. In the end it falls through, because at bottom, in reality, there is no teacher, no teaching, and nothing to teach—just as the enlightened influencer may have been saying verbally but missing existentially—and the moment you think you have something to give, you’ve already lost it. The moment you believe you’re special, you have left the axis of authentic creation. This goes back to the basic principle: Creation from ego is not creation at all. It’s manipulation dressed as service.

To invoke what may seem a strange illustration: Mary Shelley understood this quite well. In her classic, iconic novel Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus, she gave us a truly archetypal warning: Creation divorced from love becomes monstrous. Victor Frankenstein’s unhappy creature was not evil by nature. Rather, it became destructive because it was abandoned and rejected by its creator and left to wander without guidance or care. We don’t have to engage in Victor’s monomaniacal magical/scientific pursuit to encounter the same principle at work in our own experience. The principle makes itself known in any creation that arises from ego rather than stillness. It can take the form of projects that devour you, or relationships that turn toxic, or teachings that harm more than they heal. When we create to prove ourselves, to control outcomes, and perhaps to display spiritual attainment, we give birth to monsters, forms that take on a life of their own and turn against us.

Fortunately, when it comes to the furtive return of the ego as the shadow of awakening, the correction is always the same, and it’s always immediately available: Simply notice when the impulse to display holiness arises. Feel it as energy in the body, perhaps a subtle inflation in the chest, or maybe a tightening in the throat, a performance beginning in the voice. Then . . . just pause. Feel the soles of your feet against the floor, and feel the weight of the body, the ordinariness of the breath. Return to gravity. Return to the axis. Humility is an orientation, not a virtue. It’s awareness remembering where it stands: not above, and not below, but at the intersection of stillness and motion, where it is ever creating, and where it does this anonymously because there is no one to claim the creation.

The shadow dissolves when the axis is felt again. There, creation continues without anyone creating, and the work serves the whole rather than the fragment.

NEXT: The World as Self-Expression