Sharing heaven with serial killers

It is hardly surprising that on the first evening of The Dark Erotic which I held last weekend in Sydney I found myself sharing the venue space with a large group of Hare Krishna’s holding Kirtan with a venerable guru.

While they were chanting prayers to supreme beings we were exploring the shadow energies of the erotic archetypal underworld- A world of paedophiles, murderers, cannibals, seedy sexual shamans, whores and succubus’s with just a wall separating us.

Many years ago this juxtaposition would have contracted the testes of my will and I would have been thrown off my dark stallion by the purity of their devotion.

Not this time.

I am standing erect for the shadow like Puff the One Eyed Dragon or Rumpleforeskin, I am generating a stiffy that penetrates the most repugnant parts of my own psyche and the collective filth.

We may not have been praying for Lord Hari to remove our grievous sins or chanting Hare Krishna for hours to free ourselves from suffering, instead we created a temple for the outcast, diseased and leprotic arms and legs of our collective psyche. Our church pillars rested on the deep communion with the underbelly of humanity and it’s grimy entrails.

We brought forth the dark dwellers from our collective dungeons, animating these parts without separation acknowledging their acceptance by existence itself even if the majority refuses to peek into their stormy lairs.

We were confessing on our smutty knees that everything exists inside us beyond any duality of right or wrong/ good or evil.

First coined by Carl Jung, the shadow speaks to aspects of the personal and collective self that are unacknowledged, repressed or rejected. These are the aspects deemed dangerous, immoral, impure or repugnant to a ‘functioning society’, they are not static but shift with the tides of cultural current.

Hell, it was only a few hundred years ago that selling African people as part of the Atlantic slave trade was deemed acceptable. Now slave trading (which still happens) has plunged into the dark corridors of ‘shadow’, filed into the ‘deplorable’ section of our moralistic society. A rather large demotion for those New World Slave Marketeers who in the afterlife now hold titles of ‘Portaloo Pumper’ and ‘US Telemarketer’.

Shadow relegation is a bitch.

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

So why do we consent to certain attributes of the human consciousness and not all?

We are hardwired to belong and not belonging in early human civilisations meant death as we needed tribe for protection and basic survival. This fear of being cast out still lingers in our collective genetic memory and is a reality for many today in the world where exclusion from society can lead to poverty, social death and persecution.

This all seems rather dramatic but our brains are wired to belong and belonging means toeing the line of ‘acceptability’. So what happens to those parts of the human psyche that have not made it into the dropbox of morality?

Masks my dear friends.

We mask the little runts and create an identity void of the ‘yucky stuff’ and we unconsciously discard any information that contradicts this belief. In the world of psychology, this is known as confirmation bias: humans tend to interpret and ignore information in ways that confirm what they already believe.

Jung indicates that under certain circumstances, all human beings have the capacity to do horrible, brutal things. And somewhat paradoxically, familiarising ourselves with these dark potentialities and accepting them as part of us is perhaps the best way to ensure that they are never actualised. But again, it’s profoundly difficult to do this, particularly because we desperately don’t want to think of ourselves as “bad” people.

So instead of strutting through your life as someone perfectly acceptable to others, society and the world my invitation for you is to acknowledge you are also a lying, selfish pervert with a propensity for power and control and maybe a fetish for animals.

Hare Krishna, Hare Rama.