ON THE SPIRITUAL LESSONS OF THE SHADOW
A spiritual-psychological essay on the Shadow and the collective soul. Claude.ai
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To know one's evil is the beginning of healing; to deny it is the beginning of ruin. — Carl Gustav Jung
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Preface. The Threshold as a Mirror
There are dates that become milestones not only in the history of states, but in the history of the human spirit. One such threshold was crossed at a point where the hidden tension between two ways of understanding oneself, the world, and power burst forth with a force that was difficult to contain within the ordinary categories of political analysis. War is always a catastrophe of meaning before it becomes a catastrophe of bodies.
This essay is about those psychological and spiritual mechanisms that make possible — and which unfold within — any great collective tragedy. About the Shadow. About self-deception. About how nations lose and find themselves. About the lessons that the contemplation of evil offers us.
Jung wrote that what we do not look in the face returns as fate. The history of recent years is a living commentary on this thought.
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Part I. The Shadow and Its Denial
1.1. What is the Shadow
In Jungian analytical psychology, the Shadow is the totality of those aspects of the personality that an individual (or a group) rejects as incompatible with their self-image. It is not necessarily "evil" in a moral sense — it is simply that which does not fit into the accepted narrative about oneself. Cruelty, cowardice, envy, the lust for domination, fear — all of this can become part of the Shadow if the group has decided to consider itself "good," "peaceful," "spiritual," "bearers of light."
The problem is not the existence of the Shadow — every person and every nation has one. The problem arises when the Shadow is not integrated but projected. Then everything that the group refuses to acknowledge in itself begins to be "seen" in the other. The enemy becomes the embodiment of all that is dark, while one's own group becomes the guardian of the light. This is not a metaphor — it is a concrete, well-studied psychological mechanism that, on the scale of entire nations, takes on destructive forms.
1.2. The Collective Shadow: How Nations Lose Contact with Themselves
The collective Shadow accumulates over centuries. It is formed from unacknowledged historical crimes, from narratives in which "we" are always the victims or saviors, never the aggressors. From myths in which all the blood of the past is attributed to external forces or historical inevitability.
One of the most painful lessons that have unfolded over these recent years is that the collective Shadow does not disappear through denial — it grows. A people who for centuries built their identity on the image of a great spiritual mission, bringing light and order to the world, have accumulated a huge volume of unacknowledged violence, unacknowledged cruelty, unacknowledged imperial lust for domination. All of this went into the Shadow. And when the internal crisis coincided with a historical watershed, the Shadow emerged — not as an acknowledged and understood reality, but as a blind, destructive force.
This does not mean that individual people within such a nation are bad or evil. It means something more tragic: that collective psychology can operate above and contrary to individual morality — especially when there are no cultural tools for working with the group Shadow.
A country incapable of looking into the depths of its own past is doomed to act out its scenarios again and again — until the pain becomes great enough to demand an honest look.
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Part II. Psychology and Phantom Pains
2.1. The Amputated Body and Phantom Pain
Psychiatry describes the phenomenon of phantom pain: an amputated limb continues to hurt. The person feels the hand that is no longer there, and the pain in it is real pain, not imagined. Something similar happens to peoples who have lost an empire.
When a vast state body disintegrates — and with it collapses not just a political structure, but an entire system of meanings, an entire way of understanding one's place in the world — a collective phantom pain arises. The people continue to "feel" the lost body of the empire as their own body. Its absence is experienced as a mutilation, as humiliation, as an existential incompleteness.
2.2. Eschatology as Justification
Eschatological thinking simplifies the moral picture of the world to the extreme: there are "us," bearers of light, and there are "them," who hinder this light. In such a coordinate system, violence ceases to require moral justification — it itself becomes a sacred act. This is one of the most dangerous spiritual patterns in human history, as it makes dialogue impossible: one does not negotiate with those who embody metaphysical evil.
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Part III. Mechanisms of Self-Deception: The Psychology of Protective Cognition
3.1. Identity-Protective Cognition: Reason in the Service of Identity
Psychologists have described a phenomenon that can be called "identity-protective cognition": when belonging to a group becomes more important to a person than the truth, their cognitive abilities — instead of seeking truth — begin to act as advocates for a pre-established conclusion. Arguments are sought not to understand, but to defend.
3.2. The Anatomy of Collective Self-Deception
The most sophisticated kind of lie is the one you believe yourself. The most impenetrable blindness is the one that mistakes itself for sight.
3.3. Subjectlessness as a Spiritual Sickness
In the spiritual traditions of various cultures, responsibility is inseparable from agency. To be a person means to be capable of action, and therefore also capable of sin, of repentance, and of change. Renouncing agency is not humility, it is evasion. It is a spiritual gesture that masquerades as helplessness, but is in fact a refusal to meet oneself.
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Part IV. The Mirror of Trials: What It Reveals About Humanity
4.1. The Test of Humanity
A great war is a test. It lays bare what is — both the best and the worst. Of the worst: the habit of the majority to prefer comfort to truth.
Of the best: the ability of artists, poets, musicians to find words for the inexpressible.
From the ashes grow texts that people will read centuries from now. Precisely because, in extreme circumstances, a person meets themselves — face to face, with no possibility of evasion.
4.2. Homo Militans: Man at War
Peace initiatives shatter against the psychological impossibility for millions of people to return to a lost peace.
The question of how a people heals from this anthropological transformation is one of the most important spiritual and psychological questions of our time. History knows examples of such healing — but they all required decades, an honest conversation with the past, and purposeful cultural work.
4.3. Trial by Fire as Baptism
One of the most unexpected results of recent years is that an identity that has passed through the crucible of denial becomes not a fragile construct of narratives and symbols, but a living, hard-won reality. This is a tragic, but authentic, path to finding oneself.
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Part V. Collective Repentance: Is It Possible?
5.1. The Experience of Peoples Who Have Undergone Acknowledgment
It is important to understand: this is not about self-abasement or national humiliation. It is about maturity — about the capacity of a group to say: "We did this. It was wrong. We bear responsibility for it — and we will work with this knowledge." Such a stance requires immense courage. But only it opens the path to a genuine future.
5.2. Why Some Peoples Are Capable of This, and Others Are Not
When the old narrative was destroyed along with the old system, an opportunity for a new perspective opened up. But history also knows cases where peoples began this path earlier — through culture.
5.3. The Productive Path: A New Group Narrative
Psychologists working with collective trauma and collective guilt describe a more productive path than the one outlined in previous parts: the formation of a new group narrative that does not deny what was done, but places it at the center of self-understanding. "This happened. These were done by people to whom we belong. What does this say about us? What must we change?"
Such a narrative builds identity not around innocence, but around honesty and the intention to change. It is a different type of group pride — not the pride of purity, but the pride of having the courage to face the dark. Many wisdom traditions describe precisely this as the true beginning of the spiritual path: not the assertion of one's righteousness, but the honest acknowledgment of one's imperfection as a starting point.
This path requires an intellectual community capable of formulating such a narrative and offering it to society. Where this community evades the task — choosing psychological comfort over painful honesty — the catastrophe remains unprocessed, and therefore unfinished.
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Part VI. Spiritual Responsibility and Choice
6.1. History as a Result of Choices
One of the deepest illusions fostered by eschatological and deterministic thinking is the illusion of historical inevitability. This illusion removes responsibility — and that is precisely why it is so psychologically attractive.
But history is the result of choices made by concrete people at concrete moments.
Each of these choices — small or large — constitutes the fabric of historical reality. And each carries a spiritual dimension: it says something about who the person is, what they consider important, what they are willing to sacrifice and what they are willing to renounce.
6.2. The Weight of an Unjust World
Spiritual maturity demands honesty — at least before oneself. Not public self-flagellation, but inner acknowledgment: "This is my responsibility."
6.3. The World as a Collective Project
One of the lessons of recent years: peace is not a given of nature. It is a collective project, requiring constant will, constant choice, constant readiness to pay the price. The spiritual, intellectual, moral price.
Peoples who value peace must be ready to defend it — through culture, education, institutions, honest conversation about the past and present. Peoples who have lost the capacity for such a conversation also lose the capacity to truly value peace — because they do not understand how fragile what they take for granted truly is.
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Conclusion. What We Must Take Away
The first conclusion: The Shadow does not disappear through denial. The only productive path is integration: honest acknowledgment of the dark within oneself as a prerequisite for change.
The second conclusion: Intellectual communities bear a special responsibility. They are the ones who shape the narratives in which peoples live. When they evade painful honesty — choosing psychological comfort — they betray their primary function. Narratives that justify collective self-deception are no less dangerous than outright lies.
The third conclusion: Agency is not a burden, but a dignity. A people who acknowledge their capacity to act and influence — and therefore their responsibility for what happens — are open to change. A people who insist on their complete helplessness are closed to it.
The fourth conclusion: Repentance is not weakness. In spiritual traditions, from Christianity to Buddhism, acknowledging a mistake and the readiness to make amends are signs of maturity, not humiliation. Peoples capable of this create the foundation for a genuine future. Peoples incapable of it are doomed to repeat the past.
And finally — the fifth conclusion: History continues. We are all its authors. Every choice, every word is inscribed into it. This is both heavy and liberating: heavy, because it removes the alibi. Liberating — because it means that everything can still be different.
