WHAT ARE SHADOW FIGURES? We’ve been talking about the fact that a shadow figure is a meaning that you have given to yourself to identify yourself, or a meaning you have given to someone else to identify them. Now that is something far different from walking up to someone you know on the street and saying, “I Am. You Are.” You didn’t say, “I am happy. You are unhappy. I am better than you. You are worse than me.” You see? The simple fact was said, “I Am. You Are”—an acknowledgment of simplicity, an acknowledgment you could say, without any shadow figures brought into play. Now, one of the best examples of the meaning of shadow figures that I can share with you was a series of pictures on the cover of a magazine. In the first picture there’s a man obviously at work and his boss is berating him. So here we have employer/employee—boss/the one subject to the boss. Those are shadow figures. Because the fact is, I Am. You Are. You see? We Are. Not bosses, not employers, not superiors, not inferiors. But then in the next picture, we see the man who is obviously come home at the end of day. So here’s the inferior one arriving at home and he is berating his wife. Wow, quite a switch. Now he’s the superior figure and she’s the inferior. He’s the one in charge. She’s the one to be submissive. How can he be two different things? Well, the next picture shows the mother shaking her finger at the little boy—their son. And the little boy has tears in his eyes. You see? And so here we have more shadow figures. The little boy’s feelings are hurt. He thinks she’s talking to him, instead of talking to her picture of him and exercising her superiority over him—the shadow figure that he is in her mind—as a means of regaining her composure after having suffered at the hand of the shadow figure that she called her husband, and whom she gave a better superior position than hers. And then in the final picture, here’s this little boy doing the best he can with the situation and he’s looking at this little kitten . . . and he’s shaking his finger at that little kitten. You see? In every single one of those frames, there’s really only one thing that could appropriately be said: “I Am. You Are. I Am. You are. We are the holy Sons and Daughters of God. We are something quite Real. We are something quite inviolable. We are something quite equal. We are the presence of Love and our function is to be the presence of Love.” Now, Waking up is becoming free of the shadow figures. It’s that simple. But in order to become free of the shadow figures, you have to have some way of recognizing them and abandoning them. As I’ve said in the last few weeks, everyone is bouncing off of responding to the image, the picture—the meanings that they have given to others. And they are doing it from the image they have of themselves. “Well, you know what? I have a college degree. I have a job that pays very well that utilizes the skills that I have and the intelligence that I have and I have arrived at a point where I am deserving of respect.” There you go . . . you just created a shadow image. All there really is, is this: “I Am.” But you know what? This one who has defined himself as worthy of respect can, during the day, if someone else comes up and is rude or insulting to him, have hurt feelings. And if he was put down in front of a lot of people whom he has defined as “respecters of himself” he could not only feel bad but he could feel righteously angry. Now, what about these feelings? They’re all reactions to shadow images. They have absolutely nothing to do with him: “I Am.” They have to do with his image. They have to do with the shadow figure that he holds of himself. And so this shadow figure of himself says to everyone else, “Here is the way you are going to treat me: You are no longer going to treat me disrespectfully, you understand?” And this image of himself will teach the subservient images out there how to behave and treat him with respect. You see that all of this is pure fantasy. It’s pure imagination. And all the time this kind of relationship is going on, no connection is actually being made. Everybody is learning how to behave “by the book.” You know, there was a joke that went around some time back where somebody would say a number and everybody would laugh. And it turns out that the number referred to a particular joke which everybody knew and they knew that the number related to that joke so that when the number was said, they would laugh. You see? Well, if everybody is taught by everybody else how to behave appropriately, how to respond to the shadow figure, how the shadow figure that you are is supposed to respond to the shadow figure that I am, . . then when the unreal message is expressed by the shadow figure that is me, everybody else automatically responds appropriately just like laughing at a number because it applies to a joke. Do you see what I’m saying? I’m saying that that doesn’t constitute communication. It doesn’t constitute connection. It constitutes everybody responding to numbers and concepts by rote, automatically. Because it’s the way it works. It’s because it’s the way it has to be. It’s because that’s the only way you can have order in a chaotic world. Or more truthfully, that’s the only way you can have harmony when you are behaving as though you don’t know who your Source is and you don’t know who you really Are. That’s what it amounts to. I hope everyone had an interesting time at least, this past week, in paying attention to the occasions where you behaved like a shadow figure or you expected others to behave according to the shadow figure you were superimposing upon them, by holding them to a concept that you have about them that’s based upon their past behavior. It’s a very valuable lesson. It’s a very disconcerting lesson to learn. It’s a disconcerting experience to have. Because you begin to realize that perhaps there hasn’t been nearly as much of what is Real going on in your life as you thought. And of course, the point is not to get hung up on that but to rather shift gears so that you are connecting with what is Real more consistently and expressing what is Real more consistently. The only problem is, that as you find out that a lot of what you’ve been doing and a lot of your behavior has kept you in a state of ignorance, staying there will not be as satisfying as it used to be and so you could find life beginning to be depressing. Because part of you will still try to make the old paradigm work and it won’t work because you know better. You can’t make it work like you used to because you have become clearer than you were. And so you begin to see when you are using your mind, and your associates, for the purpose of creating a false sense of harmony and order without ever connecting with your fellowman. Part of what is disturbing is the loneliness that you begin to feel. You say the number of the joke and nobody laughs anymore—they always laughed before. Your world isn’t functioning like it used to. But the reason is that you know that there’s an alternative and you’ve also begun to see just exactly how you use shadow figures to keep you from your fulfillment. This is such a valuable step to find yourself on, because until you’re on this step you can’t step out of, for lack of better words, the orphanage. You can’t step out of your orphanhood. You can’t step into the fuller conscious experience of Being as the Son or Daughter of God, which is the whole point. Now, no matter how much you deny the existence of God, no matter how much you deny your inheritance—your Birthright from the Father, your Sonship or Daughtership—you still remain unalterably what God created you to be. You remain unalterably not your own creator. And you remain unalterably with a Birthright that can only be described as whole—as fulfillment embodied infinitely, as perfection experienced, as the conscious experience of the joy of recognizing everything that you’ve been looking at before and calling “the world,” to be the Kingdom of Heaven, awesomely so. So, no matter how wretched an orphan you have learned to present to the world because that shadow image gets you the most, you have just been fooling yourself. And you have been playing a charade that never ever can become Real and never has, and actually has constituted a forever-emptiness as long as you have been employing it, but which you had fooled yourself into believing was actually fulfilling. ~excerpt from ACIM Study Group with Raj/Jesus 5/14/11 (to continue reading please click onto the link below) nwffacim.org/tgp/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=31727&posts=1&highlight=transcript&highlightmode=1#M152330
Posted on: Sat, 08 Nov 2014 03:42:27 +0000
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