Do you ever feel like standing on the rooftops and screaming ‘enough is enough’? The lunacy, greed, and hypocrisy have past boiling point. Trump represents a boil, full of the darkest pus in our world, that has risen to the surface. However, I believe that Trump is also a mirror to our individual and collective shadow.
Trump is a catalyst to unite for Jungian therapy on a global scale. Carl Jung taught us that we cannot heal trauma until we acknowledge the trauma — both at the individual and at the collective level. He believed the collective ‘we’ must acknowledge our shadow, bring it into the light, and then we can start the healing and integration process. He argued: “Shadow work is the path of the Heart Warrior… One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious”. We all have a job to do. And the biggest job is on ourselves. We are all invited to be a doula for a new age of collective consciousness.
My father experienced the brutality of the Second World War first hand as a member of the Polish Resistance. He was put in prison, escaped and was hunted like a dog. He saw the ugliest brutality of the Nazi, Russian and Communist Army’s evilness. It was from this experience that he taught me two important lessons:
1. Never think the Nazis were any different than you or I. We are all capable of absolute evil, in as much as we are capable of absolute Love. This is what makes us human.
2. “Society is one missed meal from anarchy”. My father stressed the fragility of our ‘civil’ world. Never, never, take your freedom and liberties for granted, for they were created with the blood of our ancestors.
On the day following my mother’s funeral, I am making a commitment to being a Heart Warrior, a humble servant to follow where I am guided, fearlessly. I wish to become my higher self and help to heal our collective shadow in order to activate our collective potential. I acknowledge the wisdom of Lao Tzu “If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.” There is a great deal more shadow work for me to do. But I commit to standing in the fire to do this work. Many friends have offered me their sincere condolences and asked if there is anything you can do to help. I’ve asked them to hold me to account to reach my higher self, to be a humble servant. I’ve asked them to point out my shadow and my blind spots. By looking in the mirror we can work to become the best version of ourselves.
Einstein said: “No problem can be solved with the same level of consciousness that created it.” There is no doubt we live in a complex world of interconnected and interdependent problems. We need some very different thinking if we are going to have a hope of addressing them. At the core of it, I believe we need to surrender our egos in the interest of the collective and go from me to we. The consciousness movement is at the heart of this transformation.
This was my ninth year in Davos and seventh year as part of the Young Global Leaders community with the World Economic Forum. Some great things come out of Davos, but there is more tweaking of problems than fundamentally redesigning the broken global system. There is not enough conscious, organized collaboration tackling the endemic challenges in our world. As Buckminster Fuller said “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” We are living in a House of Cards and I don’t expect those at the top of the pack to be the first to knock over the pack since they have the longest to fall.
I am deep in reflection as I feel the pain and grief of the loss of both my parents and now my step-mother this week. I sense a calling coming through my heart. I am listening carefully. I hope to honor my parents through my forthcoming actions. I invite anyone who also feels called to action, to surrender, to work together to redesign and integrate our world. There should be no sacred cows. As Steve Jobs said: “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it.”
I will finish with a warning from Jung written in 1945 in his book ‘Postwar Psychic Problems of the Germans’: “No, the demons are not banished; that is a difficult task that still lies ahead. Now that the angel of history has abandoned the Germans, the demons will seek a new victim. And that won’t be difficult. Every man who loses his shadow, every nation that falls into self-righteousness, is their prey…. We should not forget that exactly the same fatal tendency to collectivization is present in the victorious nations as in the Germans, that they can just as suddenly become a victim of the demonic powers.”