Dance of the Shadows
When pursuing our real calling feels terrifying, it feels comforting to embrace the shadow calling. It acts like a palliative.
If you want to follow the series:-> The Birth of Gigyasa Project ->> Gigyasa Project Turns One
On September 3rd, 2019, I quit my corporate life and decided to pursue a life called Gigyasa Project. Come this September, it would be three years of living the life of a free agent. I wrote elsewhere this self-reflective account of what I learned so far and what I plan to do further in my pursuit of meaning and freedom.
In this post, I want to excerpt some of those writings and overlay this with the Jungian concept of shadow and explore how shadows play out in Mahabharata and our lives.
I discovered writing around 2005 when I started writing love letters to my girlfriend. I remember the heady feeling when I found for the first time in my life that this writing thing is such a drug.
An enlightening drug, to be more precise.
Which drug gives you a high while you are at it and makes you feel briefly enlightened at the tunnel's end, even if it's an uncomfortable truth about yourself you just discovered a while ago?
When I completed my engineering in 2007, I knew one thing. And that wasn't mechanical engineering. I wanted to be a writer. But the troubling fact of the matter was this. I was a terrible writer. And so while I kept writing online as my experiment of self-discovery, I took up a shadow calling - Consulting.
In "Turning Pro", where I first encountered the concept of "Shadow Careers", Steven Pressfield writes,
“That shadow career is a metaphor for our real career. Its shape is similar, its contours feel tantalizingly the same. But a shadow career entails no real risk. If we fail at a shadow career, the consequences are meaningless to us.”
Consulting is a comforting dream of shadows if you want to pursue the secret life of a writer. It equally chases truths (and fantasies), its goals are equally indirect and depending on how you approach it, it can be at best, an intellectual adventure or an existential therapy session or at worst, an eternal ego trip inside the comforting prison of your cherished beliefs.
Because I feared being a writer, I took a safe way out with a psychological game. I decided to decouple the writer as an identity from writing as a process.
In doing so, I discovered something extremely fascinating: When you keep the noun separate from the verb (and pay more attention to the verb), writing becomes way more generative and fun.
“Are you pursuing a shadow career?
Are you getting your Ph.D. in Elizabethan studies because you’re afraid to write the tragedies and comedies that you know you have inside you? Are you living the drugs-and-booze half of the musician’s life, without actually writing the music? Are you working in a support capacity for an innovator because you’re afraid to risk becoming an innovator yourself?” - Steven Pressfield, Turning Pro
I may be an agritech consultant, investor in a few agritech startups, agritech analyst, agritech researcher, digital storyteller, content creator, digital agriculture consultant, or product management consultant.
If I look in the mirror and ask myself - In doing what I am doing, what am I really doing?
W.R.I.T.I.N.G
I like to think of my free-agent career, starting from 2019, as one-year "eras". There is no other word to describe how momentous it has been in my life journey.
Explorer Era: 2019-20 was about getting high on the free part of free agent. It was an era of discovery, idealism, travelling to new shores of Central America, and trying new things.
Survival Instincts Era: 2020-21 was about surviving the pandemic, giving a TEDx talk, discovering an equanimous state (shantam) with being a free agent, discovering the relationship between price and value (when I tripled my newsletter subscription rates), and taking the lesser travelled road of a consultant who doesn't equate time with money.
An-Odyssey-to-my-Roots Era: 2021-22 was about dunking deep on Agribusiness Matters, a pilgrimage to Switzerland to discover my dharma as a global agritech consultant, studying dharma and purusarthas in the ongoing experiments to discover what it means to be an Indian, the difficulty of being dharmic amidst her civilizational aspirations in her 76th year of Independence, and starting my learning journey as an investor in agritech.
What will the fourth era of the Gigyasa Project be, when I complete three years of being a free agent this September?
Can I take the real risk of being a writer, fully knowing the dance of the shadows?
You can never dance with the shadow, let alone dream of banishing your shadows.
Can you pay attention to your shadows and see where your light is coming from?
Shadows Of our Being
When we grow up, we internalize ideas of what our community and society hold as dharmic. In doing so, we learn to reject and repress behaviours that our society describes as asuric.
These impulses of behaviour don't simply disappear. The absence of evidence is no evidence of absence. The parts of ourselves that we don’t like end up being pushed into our unconscious psyches.
The “shadow” is a concept first coined by Carl Jung to refer to this collection of repressed aspects of ourselves. We distance ourselves psychologically from those behaviours, emotions, and thoughts that we find dangerous and push them into our “shadow”. Asuric behaviour corresponds to the idea of shadow.
In the Mahabharata, the Pandava Heroes are juxtaposed against the Kaurava. Each of the Kaurava characters has all the capabilities of the Pandava they are contrasted with, but are caught with choices that come from their “shadows”.
Bhima and Duryodhana are counterpoints.
Duryodhana was capable of achieving everything Bhima could.
While Bhima seeks to find a dharmic response to the challenges he faces, Duryodhana laments that his envy overpowers him and is unable to do the right thing, even though his rational mind knows what the dharmic choice may be.
The Mahabharata is full of these plays between the “two sides of the same coin” and therefore provides a fascinating study of human behaviour in all its complexity.
Let us take the case of Yudhishtra.
His life was a commitment to role appropriateness and discipline. And in doing so, he repressed his spontaneity. This energy explodes with his compulsion to gamble which he displays in one of the most tragic and well-known episodes in the Mahabharata. This is his shadow, the disowned side that nevertheless is a part of him.
How beautiful it would be if we could look at ourselves like a raga.
A raga has many notes but has a particular combination of them that gives the raga its unique character.
We have all the propensities and powers of all the archetypes within us, available for our deployment, but each of us becomes adept at deploying a few combinations.
Sometimes we get so entrenched in one dominant propensity that we forget to use the other powers that are available to us.
Can we see the light of the shadows and use the powers that we haven’t discovered so far?