Martial art is touching the shadow
In the words of Bruce Lee: “To me ultimately Martial Art means: honestly expressing urself. Now this is very difficult to do. I mean it is easy for me to put on a show and be cocky. And be flooded with a cocky feeling… and feel like pretty cool and all that. Or I can make all kinds of phoney things… u c what i mean… blinded by it. Or i can do some really fancy movement. But to express oneself honestly… NOT LYING TO ONESELF… and to express myself honestly… that my friend is very hard to do… (@5:34 – 6:12 in video above)
No Mirrors in Hell
It was Marie Louise von Franz who equated shadow work directly with honesty. She even went as far as saying that people that are by themselves more honest are better at doing the work with shadow.
This is why the more we do “bad” things the more u hear people say: “I cannot look at myself in the mirror anymore.” Which has to do with parts of ourself we tend to hide from ourself. In a dream I saw people on a boat of sorts heading toward hell. And the deeper they descended into hell the more their faces started to turn all demonic and horrific. This represents the less we are able to look in the mirror because we have become so “ugly” in terms of not wanting to see ourselves… and what we do.
Notice the Witch’s difficulty in Snow White with the mirror, which tells her the truth.
The mirror is the reflection which shows the truth…the true identity. This is what Sartre’s Estelle, discovers: that there are no mirrors in Hell.
In a dream I was in a room toward one end with a mirror in my hand, and toward the other was a large number of demons. They were absolutely terrified at me showing them their reflection in the mirror. This is why self reflection or self awareness is the work of looking in the mirror. But also what gets us out of hell.
Pan’s Neverland
Notice in above mentioned terms of Sartre; Hell thus representing that place where there’s no self-reflection whatsoever. This is also for instance why vampire’s have to reflection in the mirror. It means we are dealing here with archetypes representing inhabitants of this netherworld called Hell. We find all these realms in which the shadow is muted Pan’s Neverland. They’re all puns on the same hell… like in the latest movie: Frozen… Disney seems very fond of this under-wonder land. This is where Alice’s also is raptured to when she falls in the rabbit hole.
This is why in terms of the boat mentioned above on its way to hell, we find in dreams again and again how the slow and gradual process of loosing self awareness (and self responsibility) and thus the cutting off of, or muting of, the shadow constitutes and represents the highway to hell.
Shattering the Mirror
I have collected any amount of dreams showing this pattern where the gradual process of loosing self reflection leads directly to the opening of the portal to that realm referred to classically as hell, and we find these persons lives being intruded by (parasitic) beings of this underworld… Or thus albeit the person descending more and more into this realm where the shadow is muted and where there are no mirrors. Obviously evil can only exist in a place where there are no mirrors.
In a dreams the dreamer is in a car carrying a mirror along with her, representing containing self awareness or reflection. “Was carrying a mirror along with me. At a certain point it broke and I left it somewhere.”
The work with the mirror is a daily practice which we time and again fall out of if we are not really vigilant. Loosing the mirror leads to a loss of containment and the entering or interfacing with these lower realms where its inhabitants can’t look in the mirror…
Can’t stand what they would see when they look in the mirror.