The Penumbra Plays

 I will start with the saying "The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek" by the American professor of literature Sir, Joseph John Campbell who worked in comparative mythology and comparative religion and whose works on various aspects of the human experience are used for carrying on research. This topic is focussed on the hidden talents of the subconscious.

A human personality comprises of both the lighter and the darker sides and to know yourself, to return to the wholeness, you have to jump to the deeper elements of the psyche. Through out decades of work and research, it is discovered that the human mental condition is fragmented among the conscious and subconscious. Most of us are aware of only a small fraction of ourselves and the remaining stays hidden from the actual view. We choose to focus on the superficial and ignore deeper dimensions of the self. One thing we must know for sure that existence of certain things can not be ignored if we don't observe or feel them. They do exist.

The more we know the darker sides of our personality, the more we will grow towards self-actualization. There is a hidden balance in ourselves like this vast cosmos. Patterns are equal and lookalike. The darker sides is termed as the shadow and the role it plays on our thinking and respective outgoings is the shadow-work. We may not understand why we do the things we do, why we get enslaved to forces outside of our control without exposing the shadow. Our thoughts, emotions, reactions, behaviour, relationships are heavily influenced by the subconscious.

Let us consider a canvas of black colour and filling the upper portion with sparkling dotes and looking the whole from a distance and certain angle, the canvas will look like a night sky and it has separate set of beauty. This beauty is same as any daylight canvas and we must open this night side of us and let it superimpose on the day side and make it a quite balanced frame of life. The yearning for growth and self-actualization is inherent to us all. Our darker sides communicate through dreams, thoughts, instincts, emotions. Resisting them to explore resists our true nature and will always result in veiled appearances. We will heal and grow once we start facing the darker sides or the shadow of ourselves.

The subconscious is in many ways a depository of all those elements we have discarded such as intense emotions, those that collide with our ego, sexual urges. We choose to lock away these traits in the chambers of mind with a one-way door. The journey to face them after breaking the door is a challenge and tough. It takes honesty and strength to approach the shadows. Confronting them means waking up the evil side of ours but once we interact with them in a non-judgemental way and utilise them to lighten-up the ones which remained submissive, we will certainly hold our head high and will point out the most beautiful canvas of life.

-Swagato Chatterjee