Unlived potential

DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Location 2800). Rainbow Ridge Books. Kindle Edition.

(Q) [Jenny's second question: "We are born as 'potential' and create a 'linear life' by the linking of experiences chosen and 'bestowed' by life's circumstances.  Every step of the journey through a human life, one is 'haunted' by the 'shadow', the unlived potential for both positive and negative capabilities.  As humans, we are challenged to acknowledge this shadow (not repress it), and find healthy expressions for its energies.  Is there a 'shadow' aspect to non-3D Reality, and if so, what is its form and function?"]

(A)  I hesitate between responding to the description of human life contained in the first part, or answering the direct question.  I think I will begin by answering the question, merely noting that the description of human life is at best partial.  Maybe we'll come back to saying why, if the question itself does not take too long.

Taking the definition of shadow as given - unlived potential - the short answer would be, no, outside of 3D conditions there is no shadow.  But explaining what that means, and why it is so, may take a bit of work.  And really it would have been easier in a way to address the first part of the question first.  But - let's see.

Remember the defining conditions of 3D experience:

·      A conviction (illusion) of separation

·      Separation from others in space

·      Separation from all other moments in time

All other distinguishing characteristics, such as delayed consequences, stem from the fact that you experience 3D existence as one moment of time, followed by another moment of time - forever, as long as you are experiencing yourself in 3D.

In such conditions, of course, your awareness is going to be limited, and it is in limitation - in awareness, in choice, in "life unlived because of other choices" - that the shadow, is generated.

The shadow, as Jenny rightly notes, is not inherently bad.  It is not being repressed so that civilized life may exist, as Freud may be said to have assumed. It is the parts of you that are better than you, as well as those that are worse than you, that are not actualized.  Sometimes this is from lack of opportunity.  Sometimes it is because your consciousness rejects them.  For whatever reason, this is the gnawing half-knowledge that your self-definition is inadequate.

(Q)  As in Steppenwolf.

(A)  As in Steppenwolf, yes.  Harry Haller came to see that not only his fears, but even, in a way, his ideas were standing in the way of his proper growth, for it is difficult in life to let something within take you to unknown territory of its accord rather than yours.

(Q)  I have read, and have always been irritated by, the saying that "man is a bourgeois compromise", and have never understood the meaning of it till right now.  It means our lives, including our predictability and our experience of ourselves ...

Merely, our lives as we lead them are the result of our own self-limiting "safe" choices.  What we think of as normal is, in fact, stunted.  I might have gotten the sense of this much earlier, if I had not been so irritated by the word "bourgeois", which in my youth was misused by every half-assed radical to try to show that he (or she, but mostly he) wasn't middle-class, but was deeper than that.  When of course that is exactly what he was.  However -

(A)  The sense of the saying is correct.  It is in the self-definitions and definitions of others and of life in general that stability is maintained, often at the expense of growth, but also often as means of preserving the predictability on which normal life depends.

Such compromises are not possible in situations in which your awareness is not limited.

(Q)  I see that.  And, no limitations, no shadow.

(A)  Well, no unacknowledged limitations.  Everything has limits, even if they are relative rather than absolute.  But it is the ignorance of one's existence, or part of one's existence rather, that is the cause of the existence of the shadow.

The shadow

DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Location 2852). Rainbow Ridge Books. Kindle Edition.

(Q)  Does this imply that outside of 3D we know exactly what we are, and that we integrate all that previously unacknowledged shadow?

(A)  No, we need to look at this a little more slowly.  As always, it is the unsuspected assumptions in your thought that lead you in wrong directions.  There is a form of duality here that I need to explain.

Jenny's question, I take it, asks if we outside of 3D conditions actively experience a shadow relative to our non-3D being.  The short answer is no, because outside of 3D there cannot be the restrictions on awareness that generated it within 3D.  However, do not take that to mean that our component "lives" are somehow changed by now being outside the restrictions that shaped them.  If you led a Victorian life, your mind - your soul - remains what it was when you finished making active 3D choices; that is, when you dropped the body.  It does not magically change to be everything it might have been and wasn't.

Except - that is true and it isn't true.  True insofar as what you might call the in-process life (even though the life is actually ended); not true in terms of the overall view of the life - the completed self, we have been calling it - because that encompasses and incorporates all versions of the life, and therefore by definition can have no unlived potential.

Do you see why I made the distinction?  It is merely for completeness, lest anyone think that their choices in 3D do not matter.

(Q)  They do but they don't.

(A)  You're going to find it hard to make absolute statements whose opposites do not also apply.  Every statement's truth or falsity depends on the point from which it is viewed.  Context is everything.