Forgiving Your Dark Side: Why It Was Necessary (Alan Watts)

You have learned that the past is an illusion, a ghost that cannot touch you. Yet why do you still carry the heavy luggage of your old sins? You strive to be pure, to be a saint without a shadow.

But be warned, this is the ultimate trap. Because the person who denies their own darkness is the most dangerous person in the room. Let me show you why.

There is a glorious phrase I have always been fond of and it goes something like this. The universe is fundamentally based on an element of irreducible rascality. Now let that sink in for a moment.

Irreducible rascality. It means that no matter how hard you scrub, no matter how much you polish, no matter how many prayers you say or how many self-help books you read, you cannot get rid of that little twinkle of mischief in the eye of God. And thank heavens for that.

Because if you could, if you succeeded in cleaning up the universe so that it was purely steriley good, it would be like a woman who is too beautiful to touch, frozen, lifeless, and ultimately quite boring. But you see, we don't feel this way about ourselves, do we? Especially as we get older.

We look back at our lives, at the trail of debris we have left behind, the broken promises, the little lies, the moments of sheer selfishness, the secret desires that we wouldn't dare whisper to a priest or a therapist, and we cringe. We look at this dark side of our nature, and we treat it like a cancer. We think if only I could cut this out, if only I could surgically remove this jealousy, this anger, this lust, then I would be a spiritual person, then I would be acceptable.

And so we spend the better part of our lives playing a game of hide-and-seek with our own shadows. We put on a mask. We walk out the door in the morning with our smiles fixed, acting the part of the responsible citizen, the loving parent, the wise elder.

But all the while underneath the surface there is a quaking mess of anxiety and guilt. We feel like imposters. We feel that if people really knew what went on inside our heads, they would run screaming in the other direction.

But here is where we return to that danger I warned you about. The cosmic joke that nobody tells you in Sunday school is this. The person who strives to be perfectly good, the person who tries to suppress their shadow entirely inevitably turns into a monster.

You know the type, the people who are so convinced of their own righteousness that they have no compassion for human frailty because they have denied the devil in themselves. They see the devil everywhere else. They project their own darkness onto their neighbors, onto other political parties, onto other nations.

They become crusaders. And as history shows us, the most horrific crimes are often committed by people who believe they are doing the absolute right thing. So the first thing we must understand if we are to find any peace at all is that your dark side is not a mistake.

It is not a design flaw. It is not something that slipped past the creator when he wasn't looking. It is the manure that allows the rose to bloom.

You see, you cannot have the mountain without the valley. You cannot have the crest of the wave without the trough. They go together.

They arise mutually. If you try to have the positive without the negative, you are trying to pull a fast one on the universe. You are trying to be a magnet with only a north pole.

And the more you try to be a saint, the more you will find yourself haunted by demons. The harder you try to be light, the longer and darker the shadow you cast. This is why the truly holy people, the old Zen masters, the towist sages, they often had a very wicked sense of humor.

They were often portrayed as ragged, laughing madmen. They didn't look like statues in a church. They looked like human beings who had made friends with their own rascality.

They understood that to be whole is much more important than to be good. So I want you to relax. I want you to put down the heavy burden of trying to be perfect.

Let us start from the assumption that you are a scoundrel. I am a scoundrel. We are all in our own ways rascals.

And once we admit that, once we stop pretending, we can finally begin to have a real conversation. We can finally stop wasting all our energy holding the beach ball underwater. You know how that is.

You try to push the ball of your dark emotions down, down, down. But the moment you get tired, the moment you lose focus, it pops up and hits you in the face. Let's stop pushing.

Let's let the ball float. Let's look at this darkness not as an enemy to be destroyed but as the very soil from which your soul is trying to grow. Because my dear friend, you cannot appreciate the warmth of the fire unless you have known the biting cold.

And you cannot truly love until you have understood what it means to hurt. Now let's get a little closer to the bone. Let's talk about that specific heaviness you carry in your chest.

The one that doesn't quite go away even when you're on vacation, even when things are supposedly going well. You see, as we move through life, especially when we reach the middle years and beyond, we accumulate a certain inventory. I'm not talking about your assets, your house, or your stock portfolio.

I'm talking about the inventory of the heart. We look back and we see a landscape littered with whatifs and should have bins. There is a strange phenomenon that happens when you lie awake at night.

The distractions of the day fade away. The television is off. The phone is silent.

The demands of work and family are suspended. And suddenly you are left alone with the one person you have been trying to avoid. yourself.

And in that silence, the mind begins to play its old home movies. It replays the moment you lost your temper and said something unforgivable to someone you loved. It replays the opportunity you were too afraid to take.

It brings up those secret thoughts, the flashes of envy you felt when your best friend succeeded. the sudden inexplicable urge to run away from your marriage, the petty resentments you hold against your parents or your children. And you look at this stuff, this sludge in the basement of your mind, and you think, "My god, I am a fraud.

" This is the great secret pain of the civilized human being. We are all walking around playing a role. The word person, you know, comes from the Latin word persona, which referred to the masks worn by actors in the Greco Roman theater.

The mask had a megaphone built into the mouth so the voice could project. So to be a person is literally to be a mask. It is a role we play.

You play the role of the doctor, the lawyer, the beautiful husband, the sacrificing mother, the wise grandmother. You put on the costume. You learn the lines.

You smile at the dinner parties. You say, "I'm fine. Thank you.

" And you. But inside, ah, inside there is a riot going on. Inside there is a frightened child or a raging bull or a lustful sata or a trembling coward.

And because you identify so strongly with the mask, because you think you are the good citizen, you are terrified that the mask will slip. You live in a constant state of lowgrade anxiety that someone is going to find you out. You feel that if people could see your thoughts, if they could play back the tape recording of your internal monologue, they would lock you up.

So you hide. You build walls. You become stiff.

You see this in people as they age. They often become rigid physically and mentally. They hold on tighter and tighter to their dignity, their rightness, because they are afraid that if they let go even for a second, all that suppressed darkness will spill out and ruin everything.

It is an exhausting way to live, isn't it? to be the warden of your own prison. To be constantly monitoring your own behavior, judging your own thoughts, slapping your own hand every time it reaches for the cookie jar of desire.

And the tragedy is that this isolation is an illusion. You look at other people, the neighbors, the people on the television, and they look so put together. They look so calm and you think, "Everyone else has figured it out but me.

Everyone else is normal. I am the broken one. " Let me tell you something that might relieve you of that burden.

Everyone is faking it. Everyone, the Pope, the president, the Dalai Lama, your neighbor with the perfect lawn. They are all at their core just as messy, just as confused, just as full of weird contradictions as you are.

They are all sitting on the same pot of boiling water. The resonance of this pain comes from the fact that we have split ourselves in two. We have the eye that we show to the world.

The eye that wants to be good and loved. And then we have the me that we shove into the closet, the shadow. And the more we shove it into the closet, the more it bangs on the door.

It manifests as anxiety, as depression, as sudden outbursts of anger, as psychossematic illness. It's the energy of life that you have damned up. And because it cannot flow, it becomes stagnant.

It becomes a swamp. But and here is where we begin to turn the corner. What if I told you that the swamp is necessary?

What if I told you that the very things you are ashamed of are the raw materials for your enlightenment? You are sitting there judging yourself for having a dark side. But you might as well judge the sun for casting a shadow.

You are suffering because you are trying to be a one-sided coin. You want the heads without the tails. And nature in her infinite wisdom does not manufacture one-sided coins.

Come with me for a moment. I want you to imagine a lotus flower. It is one of the most exquisite things in the world.

It sits on the surface of the water, pristine, white or pink, unfolding its petals to the sun. It looks like perfection itself. If you were a poet, you would write sonnetss about its purity.

But where does the lotus come from? If you follow the stem down, down beneath the surface of the water, down into the murky depths, you find its roots buried in the mud and the slime. Now, you could cut off the flower and put it in a vase on your altar.

It would look beautiful for a day or two, but then it would wither and die. Why? Because it has been severed from its source.

The flower needs the mud. The filth, the decaying matter, the dirty stuff down at the bottom is exactly what the lotus feeds on. It transforms that muck into fragrance and beauty.

Do you see the connection? You are the lotus and your dark side, your anger, your jealousy, your strange desires, that is the mud. If you try to cut yourself off from your dark side because it smells bad, because it's messy, you cut yourself off from the very energy that allows you to bloom.

You become plastic. You become a synthetic flower. Clean, yes, but dead.

We have this funny idea in the west that we can have mountains without valleys. We want to live purely on the peaks of happiness and virtue. But look at a wave in the ocean.

Can you have a wave that only has a crest? A wave that only goes up? Impossible.

The crest of the wave, the high point is created by the trough, the low point. They are not two separate things. They are one single movement of the water.

If you get rid of the trough, the crest disappears. So when you feel a low point in your life or a low quality in your character, it is simply the trough that supports the crest of your virtue. Your capacity for great love is equal to your capacity for great anger.

Your capacity for bravery is rooted in your capacity for terror. They are the same energy. just flowing in different directions.

Think of a great tree, the sequoia. It reaches high into the sky touching the clouds. But as the psychologist Carl Jung liked to say, no tree can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.

The taller the tree, the deeper and wider the root system must be to anchor it. If you have a big ego, a big persona, a big presence in the world, you must have a correspondingly deep shadow. It's simple physics.

It's spiritual engineering. The problem arises only when you look at the roots and say, "H, that's ugly. That shouldn't be there.

" You look at the manure that fertilizes the rose bush and you hold your nose. You say, "Get this filth out of my garden. " Well, if you remove the manure, you starve the rose.

The universe is a system of polarity. Up implies down. Front implies back.

Light implies darkness. You cannot know what light is unless you have a contrast. If everything were white, if the whole universe were a blinding white light, you wouldn't be able to see anything.

It would be the same as being blind. You need the shadows to define the shapes. You need the background to see the foreground.

Your dark side is the background against which your light shines. It provides the friction necessary for life to happen. Without friction, you couldn't walk.

You would slide around everywhere. Without the resistance of the air, a bird couldn't fly. Without the resistance of your own shadow, your soul would have no substance.

So instead of looking at your flaws as something to be ashamed of, try to see them as the raw material of your existence. This is the compost of your life. And what do we do with compost?

We don't hide it in a safe and pretend it doesn't exist. We don't worship it either. We churn it.

We let it ferment. We let it transform. The most beautiful people I have ever met are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.

These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen. They are forged in the fires of their own darkness.

You are not a static object that needs to be polished. You are a process. You are a flowing river.

And a river carries everything. The clear water from the melting snow and the silt from the river bank. It is all part of the flow.

To reject the silt is to stop the river. And a stopped river becomes a stagnant pool. Let the river flow.

Let the mud be mud. Let the flower be flour. and realize that deep down in the mysterious alchemy of the universe, they are one and the same.

Now we come to the crux of the matter, the great illusion that keeps the psychiatrists in business and the pharmaceutical companies wealthy. We have established that you have a dark side. We have established that this is natural.

But why is it so hard to live with? Why do we feel this constant internal friction? It is because you are fighting a civil war.

And the reason this war never ends, the reason you never achieve that final victory of good you over bad you is very simple yet totally shocking when you first really see it. The reason you cannot win the war against your dark side is that the you who is fighting is the same as the you who is being fought. Let me explain.

We have this idea that inside our heads there are two people. There is the higher self, the conscience, the soul, the responsible adult. And there is the lower self, the animal, the sinner, the child.

And we identify ourselves with the higher self. We say, "I am trying to control my temper. I am trying to stop drinking.

I am trying to be more generous. But who is this eye? Who is this I that is trying to improve me?

If you look closely, you will see that the I who wants to be good is actually a very slippery character. Why do you want to be good? Be honest.

Is it because you just naturally love goodness? Or is it because you are afraid? Afraid of punishment, afraid of social ostracism, afraid of not being spiritual enough?

Or perhaps you want to be good so that you can congratulate yourself on being better than the other people who aren't trying as hard as you. You see, the motivation to be good is often rooted in the very selfishness that you are trying to destroy. It is the ego trying to polish itself up.

It is a thief dressed in a policeman's uniform. The thief yells, "Stop, thief! " and runs into the crowd to catch himself.

It is a brilliant disguise. By fighting your dark side, the ego gives itself a job. It makes itself feel important.

It says, "Look at me. I'm working so hard to be a saint. " But it is all a game.

This is why self-improvement in the way we usually practice it is a trap. It is like trying to pull yourself up into the air by tugging on your own shoelaces. You can tug and tug until you are blue in the face, but you won't budge an inch because the thing doing the pulling is the same thing that is being pulled.

You cannot bite your own teeth. You cannot taste your own tongue. You cannot touch the tip of this finger with the tip of this finger.

And you as an ego cannot improve yourself because you are the mess. The part of you that says I must change is exactly the part that needs changing. So you get into this vicious circle.

Let's say you feel guilty about being angry. So you say I must not be angry. Now you are angry at yourself for being angry.

Then you realize that being angry at yourself is not very spiritual. So you get angry at yourself for being angry at yourself. It is an infinite regress.

It is a hall of mirrors. You are chasing your own tail and the faster you run, the faster the tail moves away. This is the illusion of the internal battle.

We think that if we fight the darkness hard enough, eventually we will kill it. But you cannot fight darkness with a sword. You cannot sweep darkness out of a room with a broom.

If you want the darkness to leave, you don't fight it. You turn on the light. But here is the trick.

The light is not the ego. The light is not your willpower. The light is simply awareness.

It is the act of watching without judgment. When you judge your dark side, when you condemn it, you are giving it energy. You are making it real.

You are locking yourself in a room with a monster and throwing away the key. As Carl Young said, what you resist persists. If I tell you, do not think of a pink elephant.

What is the first thing that pops into your mind? A pink elephant. If you tell yourself, "Do not be lustful," you will immediately become obsessed with lust.

Do not be anxious and you will become anxious about your anxiety. This is the great deception of our moral culture. We are taught that we must constantly police ourselves.

We must be the watchmen of our own souls. But as the old Latin question goes, ipsos custodes. Who watches the watchmen?

If I am the one watching myself to make sure I don't do anything bad, then who is watching I to make sure my watching is honest? It leads nowhere. It leads to a state of chronic tension.

You are holding your breath. You are clenching your muscles. You are living in a state of spiritual constipation.

And this is why so many religious and good people look so miserable. They are exhausted. They are carrying the weight of a war that cannot be won because the enemy is themselves.

They have split the universe into me versus myself and they are caught in the crossfire. The reality is there is no separate thinker behind the thoughts. There is no separate feeler behind the feelings.

There is just the thinking, just the feeling. When you are angry, there isn't you plus anger. There is just anger.

You are the anger in that moment. And when you are loving, there isn't you plus love. You are the love.

The illusion is that there is a permanent you standing on the riverbank watching the river flow. No, you are the river. And sometimes the river is muddy and sometimes it is clear, but it is always the river.

So stop trying to be the policeman. Stop trying to arrest your own shadow. It doesn't work.

The more you fight it, the stronger it gets. It feeds on your resistance. It grows fat on your guilt.

Guilt is not a virtue. Guilt is just another form of self-indulgence. It is a way of wallowing in your own badness so that you can feel important enough to be a tragic figure.

Drp it. Drp the war. Drp the idea that you can fix yourself.

You can't. You are the problem you are trying to solve and you cannot solve it using the same level of thinking that created it. We need a shift.

We need a completely different approach. We need to move from the battlefield to the dance floor. So here we are.

You have dropped the sword. You have realized that fighting your shadow is like trying to put out a fire with gasoline. But now comes the frightening question.

If I don't fight it, won't it take over? If I don't repress my anger, won't I go around punching people? If I don't repress my desires, won't I become a maniac?

This is the great fear of the civilized mind. We believe that underneath the pavement of civilization there is a wild beast waiting to tear everything apart. But this is only true if you keep the beast in a cage.

A caged animal is vicious. A wild animal in its natural habitat has a dignity and a grace. The shift we are talking about is not about acting out.

It is not about indulgence. It is about something the Chinese tauists call wooi. This is often translated as non-action.

But that's a terrible translation. It sounds like laziness. It sounds like sitting on the sofa and watching the world burn.

Woue actually means not forcing. It means action in accordance with the grain of nature. It is the art of sailing rather than rowing.

When you row, you use your own muscle to push against the water. When you sail, you use the wind's energy to move you. You don't fight the wind, you harness it.

So, how do we apply wooi to your dark side? We do it through the art of radical hospitality. Imagine that your negative emotions, your fear, your shame, your rage are unwanted guests knocking at your door.

Usually you bar the door. You shout, "Go away. You are not welcome here.

" But they keep pounding. They break the windows. They sneak down the chimney.

And the whole house shakes with the conflict. The shift happens when you open the door. You open the door wide.

You look at the monster standing there dripping with slime. And you say, "Ah, it's you again. Come in.

Sit down. Let's have some tea. " This sounds insane, I know, but try it.

The next time you feel a wave of deep jealousy, instead of saying I shouldn't feel this, say to yourself, I am feeling jealous. Hello, jealousy. What do you have to tell me today?

When you observe a feeling without judging it, a miracle occurs. You create a space around it. You are no longer possessed by the feeling.

You are the host of the feeling. And because you are not fighting it, the tension dissolves. The feeling is allowed to rise, peak, and this is the key, pass away.

You see, emotions are like weather. They are energy in motion cuz storms don't last forever. They blow in, they rage, and they blow out.

But if you build a dam to stop the storm, you create a catastrophe. When you invite the demon to tea, when you look it in the eye with curiosity instead of fear, you discover something fascinating. You discover that the demon is not a demon at all.

It is just energy. It is trapped life force. That anger you were so afraid of, when you stop fighting it, you realize it is actually the energy of determination.

It is the fire that allows you to set boundaries and protect what you love. That lust you were ashamed of. It is the energy of vitality, of creativity, of connection, that sadness.

It is the energy of depth, of empathy, of the ability to feel the sorrow of the world. The darkness is simply energy that has been labeled bad by your ego. Once you remove the label, once you remove the judgment, the energy becomes neutral.

It becomes fuel. This is the alchemical process. You don't get rid of lead to find gold.

You transform the lead into gold. You don't get rid of your neurosis. You transform them into your particular style of wisdom.

There is a wonderful story about a Zen master. He was meditating in a cave and a tiger appeared. A real tiger.

The disciples ran away screaming. The master sat still. The tiger sniffed him, walked around him, and eventually lay down beside him and fell asleep.

The disciples came back later trembling and asked, "Master, how did you do that? Did you use a magic spell? " The master smiled and said, "No, I simply had no resistance to him.

" When you have no resistance inside you, there is nothing for the tiger to attack. When you stop resisting your own dark side, it stops attacking you. It stops being a complex or a disorder.

It just becomes part of the landscape of who you are. and you become integrated, you become whole. This is what KL Jung meant by shadow work.

It isn't about working hard. It is about relaxing into the truth of what is. It is saying yes to the present moment even if the present moment contains something uncomfortable.

Yes, I am hurting. Yes, I am angry. Yes, I am afraid.

The moment you say yes, the war is over. And when the war is over, the energy that you were using to fight yourself becomes available for living. You suddenly have all this extra energy.

You feel lighter. You feel more spontaneous. You are no longer checking your reflection in the mirror every 5 minutes to make sure your mask is straight.

You are flowing with the stream instead of swimming upstream. And the stream knows where it is going. It is going to the ocean.

So let the monsters come for tea. They might break a teacup or two. They might make a mess.

But they will not stay forever. And when they leave, they might just leave behind a gift, a jewel of insight that you could never have found in the light of day. And then quietly, without any fanfare, the weight drops.

It is a sensation similar to taking off a pair of shoes that were two sizes too small, which you have been wearing for 40 years. You wiggle your toes. You feel the ground beneath you and a massive sigh of relief escapes your lips.

This is the awakening. It is not a flash of lightning. It is not seeing angels blowing trumpets in the sky.

It is simply the realization that you are allowed to be exactly who you are. You realize that the dark side you were so terrified of was never really a monster. It was a shadow puppet.

You are holding your own hands up against the fire light, making scary shapes on the wall and scaring yourself to death. But when you turn around and face the fire, the shadows disappear, or at least they fall behind you where they belong. This state of being is what the Japanese call sati.

But don't let the fancy word fool you. It is the most ordinary thing in the world. It is the feeling of coming home.

You look in the mirror and for the first time you don't see a project to be fixed. You see a human being. You see the wrinkles, the gray hair, the scars of your battles and you don't recoil.

You see the glint of the rascal in your eyes. And instead of feeling shame, you wink at yourself. You realize that you are a package deal.

The kindness and the selfishness, the wisdom and the foolishness, they are all woven together in a single intricate tapestry. To pull out one thread would be to unravel the whole thing. There is a tremendous sense of humor in this awakening.

You begin to laugh, not a cynical laugh, but a cosmic belly laugh. You laugh at how serious you were. You laugh at how hard you tried to be the general manager of the universe, trying to control every variable, trying to force your river to flow in straight lines.

You realize that the universe doesn't make mistakes. Clouds are never the wrong shape. Mountains are never in the wrong place.

The ocean never makes a wave that is bad. And you, you are a natural phenomenon just as much as a cloud or a wave. You are something the whole universe is doing right now, right here.

If you have a dark side, it is because the universe has a dark side. The galaxies have black holes. The forests have decomposition.

Life feeds on life. It is a messy, beautiful, terrifying, glorious business. And you are part of it.

You are not a stranger here. You didn't come into this world like a foreign intruder. You came out of this world like a leaf comes out of a tree.

So your darkness is the universe's darkness. Your light is the universe's light. When you accept this, you stop taking everything so personally.

Your anger isn't your failure. It's just a storm passing through the canyon. Your lust isn't your sin.

It's the pull of gravity, the drive of life to continue itself. This doesn't mean you go out and hurt people. Paradoxically, it means the opposite.

A person who has made peace with their own darkness is the safest person to be around. They don't need to project their shadow onto others. They don't need to start wars to prove they are righteous.

They are humble. They know they are capable of anything, both the greatest good and the greatest evil. And that self-nowledge keeps them grounded.

You become what I like to call a holy rascal. You are holy because you are whole. You are a rascal because you don't take the game too seriously.

You can play your role in society. You can be the parent, the worker, the citizen. But you know it is just a role.

You know that behind the mask there is just the infinite playful dancing energy of the cosmos. And in this acceptance you find a peace that passes all understanding. It is not the piece of a graveyard.

It is the peace of a flowing river. It is dynamic. It is alive.

You are free. Free to be human. Free to make mistakes.

Free to be imperfect. And let me tell you, an imperfect authentic human being is a thousand times more beautiful than a perfect plastic saint. Because the imperfect human is real.

And reality with all its grit and grime is the only place where God actually lives. So where does this leave us, my friend? When you finally put down the sword and embrace your own shadow, a wonderful terrifying thing happens.

The noise stops. The civil war inside your head comes to a ceasefire. You look at the difficult people in your life, the angry boss, the resentful relative, and instead of hating them, you understand them.

You see their darkness, and you say, "Ah, I know that territory. I have that same monster living in my basement. " And suddenly the judgment evaporates.

It is replaced by a strange sorrowful compassion. You realize we are all just children trying to navigate the dark, bumping into furniture, crying out for love. The moment you forgive yourself, you inevitably forgive the world.

But and here is the secret door I want to show you. Once the war is over, once the house is quiet, you are left with something else. You are left with yourself.

For most people, this is the scariest moment of all. We fill our lives with noise, with people, with distractions because we are terrified of being left alone in a room with our own thoughts. But now that you have made friends with your demons, now that you have invited the rascal to tea, the empty room is no longer a prison.

It becomes a sanctuary. You see, society tells you that to be alone is to be failed, to be unwanted, to be lonely. But there is a massive difference between being lonely and being in solitude.

Loneliness is the poverty of self. Solitude is the richness of self. In fact, if you go deep enough into that silence, you might discover that this aloneeness is actually all oneness.

You might discover that the only being in the universe who is truly eternally alone is God because there is nothing outside of him. So how do we step into that divine power? How do we turn the pain of isolation into the ecstasy of creation?

That is the dangerous beautiful path we must walk next. For now, just sit with your tea, enjoy the silence and ask yourself, if I am no longer fighting myself, who is the one sitting here? I'll be waiting for you in that silence.

Good night.