a bit more on shadow eating & dragon slaying
robin asks:
we tweeted back & forth about it a little & i think it’s worth writing up here
so what lewis wants you to do, the thing that he thinks works, is to convert to christianity, recognize your sins as sins, and repent. it’s his belief/experience that when you let your cravings be your master & lead you to sin, your desires won’t be satisfied but will just grow bigger & needier. but when you renounce your sin & pray for help against temptation, you will often find, to your surprise, that their are moral options for actually satisfying your desires. he usually talks about this in terms of sexuality & marriage, but he clearly thinks it applies to other cravings.
i don’t think it’s an accident that shadow-eating is a two-player game, ego vs shadow, but lewis’ dragon-slaying scenarios have at least three players, ego dragon & angel. he does not think you can do this on your own. shadow-eating advocates tend to believe that you can’t kill the shadow at all—lewis clearly agrees that you can’t do it by yourself—the difference between them might just be the belief in other agents to help you do it
i feel like i should mention that i’m not a christian
all of this being said, i do have a secular example of dragon-slaying, killing your vice & finding that you get more enjoyment than that vice ever gave you
a lot of people have described this experience to me. they habitually ate a lot of fast food, candy, highly processed food etc etc etc, whenever they craved it. the consequences started catching up to them. they decide to totally forswear unhealthy food. for a while it’s very hard but eventually, to their surprise, they find that they are getting more pleasure from eating healthy food than the unhealthy food ever gave them. not just down-the-line pleasure, not just feeling better in their body, but immediate taste pleasure. a while after that they sometimes find that even their cravings have rearranged themselves. their cravings start to give them good information about what food they need. they are shocked to find themselves back in the position of eating whatever they want
obviously this doesn’t always happen when people try to eat healthy—but it often does
on a different note. i’ve often felt frustrated when reading people’s descriptions of shadow-eating or dragon-slaying. shadow-eaters seem to agree that you have to fully accept the thing, and dragon-slayers seem to agree that you have to fully renounce the thing. but they both also say that accepting the thing destroys it or that destroying it recreates it. i don’t fault them for describing their experiences honestly. but i also don’t understand how i can fully accept whatever shadow aspect i’m trying to accept, if i suspect from reading people’s descriptions of shadow work, that by accepting it i might destroy it. & i don’t understand how i can fully renounce whatever shadow-aspect i’m trying to renounce, if i suspect that renouncing it will make it come back
> [CS Lewis believes that] when you let your cravings be your master & lead you to sin, your desires won’t be satisfied but will just grow bigger & needier. but when you renounce your sin & pray for help against temptation, you will often find, to your surprise, that their are moral options for actually satisfying your desires.
a) The wrong choice. This highly reminds me of this online article on the wetiko concept. (I have some 'honing' browser tabs I keep open on my phone at all times, this being one of them. is this a thing people do, like intentionally? I can't be the only one.) Anyways, "according to Native Americans, Wetiko is an evil spirit that invades human minds. It’s a “virus” of selfishness. A physic pathogen forcing the victim to feed their insatiable needs as if they were starving." And that is just a terrible state to be in; and ofc when we're in it, we're in it unconsciously, because no one would actually choose this.
b) Something like (and I do agree with Lewis here) the right choice. By another name, classic sublimation. I know, I know, the associations with Freud don't look good; but honestly from when I learned about it, this is what I take it to be. Any socially undesirable impulse has some socially acceptable/ productive/ desirable equivalent. Simple as that. (Sometimes you need to get creative with it, but there's always some other channel for it).
Anger: undesirable -- hitting your spouse, yelling, blaming; acceptable -- chopping wood, kickboxing.
I think binge-eating falls under the 'socially undesirable' category too. Because while it's not outwardly harmful, it does carry shame for a number of reasons. One of the very interesting (and happy) things I noticed was increasing (meaningful/ engaging) social interaction led this habit to (more or less) simply slip away. I do tend to agree with the idea that binge-eating is about craving life and connection (and sensation, but that's bc it again connects you to the world) -- and surprisingly, I found a sublimation where I wasn't looking for it. So that's another thing to note: sometimes your sublimative(?)/ shadow-dissolving behaviour might take you by storm, from a different corner of life.
> i also don’t understand how i can fully accept whatever shadow aspect i’m trying to accept, if i suspect from reading people’s descriptions of shadow work, that by accepting it i might destroy it. & i don’t understand how i can fully renounce whatever shadow-aspect i’m trying to renounce, if i suspect that renouncing it will make it come back
Both accepting the shadow and renouncing the shadow are different ways of describing the same thing (I am not sure if a given experience can be interpreted either way, though I suspect yes) which is to experience the complex which was repressed. Having thoughts about the experience tends not to help, and often just interferes, whether you’re suspicious that your efforts won’t bring about the intended result or hopeful that they will.