Am I selfish? You bet!

A sting of embarrassment is a gift in disguise, if only we learn to see it this way.

“Oh, those faces watching what Evgeny was doing!” — said our host, putting me into the spotlight. We just finished the first round of the Money Game¹ at Funconference, a retreat of the Foundrs community. I was sitting among ten of my friends.

I felt very uncomfortable. I immediately saw that in that first round of the game, I was behaving like the greediest, meanest bastard with the selfishness that would put Donald Trump to shame.

A few days later, I was discussing my dreams with David, my psychoanalyst. I told him about the Money Game.

“It’s interesting that in your dreams, there’s a mean, greedy side of you coming up. That’s good.” — he said.

It may be good indeed, but certainly not pleasant.

I’d rather imagine figures of light…

Show me someone who hasn’t heard of “shadow”, a Jungian term describing parts of ourselves that we don’t like and try very hard to ignore. So much has been written about the importance of facing your shadow. A bit less is written about how disagreeable it is to meet it.

We tend to have this fantasy that we will grow by discovering new and wonderful parts of ourselves that will make us more aware of how wonderful we already are. Who hasn’t taken some online test on Facebook promising to tell you which type of this or that you are, with the implicit promise that it will be at least interesting and ideally helpful but certainly not painful?

Another popular fantasy these days is that meditation will be a pain-free path towards being nicer, calmer and less stressed, even enlightened. Yes, sure. What’s rarely mentioned is that the path there lies through sitting with all the disagreeable stuff that keeps coming up from the subconscious.

That’s the real block for nearly everyone in meditation: sitting and witnessing painful stuff for hours and years is hard. Before you’re free of something, you’ll have to look it in the eye.

The reality that Carl Jung was pointing to is that all of us have our shadow sides, and facing them is disagreeable. Yet, that’s where our growth lies.

That’s why David said it’s good news that my greed and selfishness are coming up in dreams. It’s good that I felt the embarrassment of being triggered into being a selfish bastard in the blink of an eye through a carefully constructed setup of the Money Game.

It’s good because my psyche is growing strong enough to see my selfishness and greed and not recoil in disgust, pretending

That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.

I’d like to think that I am a nice person. Enough people told me over the years that I am. Yet, psychologically speaking, it’s a trap: I like to believe this fantasy and others reinforce it, therefore keeping the darker, uglier side of me in the unconscious, from where it directs my life without my having any idea.

That’s what Jung meant by “imagining figures of light”. Instead, we need to make the darkness conscious.

Nothing that is human is alien to me

Terence, a Roman playwright and philosopher, famously said:

“I am a man, I consider nothing that is human alien to me.”

Nothing that is human? That’s a lot. Things that we hate in others are usually things that we haven’t yet met in ourselves.

I have a lot of hate reserved for Russia because of (among other things) the war in Ukraine. A part of me wishes hell onto the people who gave the order to go and kill countless people in the name of their warped fantasies.

Yet, geopolitics aside, did I just wish hell onto some other living beings who, according to me, have a wrong view of the world? Sure, I can justify it with eloquent arguments, but how about my own wrathful, hateful side that rejoices when Ukraine scores a military victory, killing human beings in the process?

That’s how you start meeting your shadow. You don’t just decide to do it one afternoon. You let the discomfort of your feelings sink in and look it in the eyes for as long as you can. You won’t be able to do it all in one go; it’s a lifelong journey. You just keep showing up for the appointment with your shadow for the rest of your life if you want to keep growing.

I stopped following a popular meditation teacher when he effectively publicly endorsed the genocide in Gaza, justifying it with sophisticated arguments. You don’t record loving-kindness meditations wishing “all beings without exception be happy” and then record a podcast explaining how some of those beings deserve to die ASAP. That’s a pointer to unprocessed shadow stuff if I ever saw one.

Yet, I’m the same. Wishing all beings without exception happiness, while my shadow part makes exceptions for some people in the Kremlin and a few other places and occasionally orders a beef burger while “liking” anti-animal cruelty ads on Instagram.

It’s hard being human, isn’t it? Nothing that is human is alien to me, as it turns out.

Yet, the way forward isn’t descending into denial. It’s meeting our shadow stuff day after day for the rest of our lives, knowing that we’ll never run out of disagreeable things to meet.

Here’s my greed, which I don’t like, and it’s okay.

Here’s my selfishness, which I don’t like, and it’s okay.

Here’s my hate, which I don’t like, and it’s okay.

Here’s my arrogance, which I don’t like, and it’s okay.

Here’s my cowardice, which I don’t like, and it’s okay.

Here’s my vanity, which I don’t like, and it’s okay.

Where to go from here?

Next time you notice your own (or someone else’s) behaviour that you don’t like, try to meet it with compassion. You aren’t broken if you’re “not perfect”; you’re human.

Get to know exactly how you’re being less than your own fantasy of yourself. That will be harder than you expect, and yet it’ll lead you to a place of being bigger than your shadow. After all, we don’t banish unpleasant parts of ourselves. We grow bigger than they are.

And don’t forget that it’s a life-long journey. It was never meant to be a weekend course.

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1. I won’t reveal the rules of the Money Game to avoid spoiling it for those who haven’t played yet (if you get a chance, do it!). You show up with a meaningful amount of cash that you should be prepared to lose and are told how it works immediately before the start. You learn useful things in the process.