On my run this morning, I saw an old man hunched over a walker on the other side of the street. He was moaning in pain. Groups of healthy young men and women passed him by, scrolling on their phones. I felt hurt and shocked. I crossed the road and asked him if he needed help. He said yes. We talked for a while, and I reassured him that he would be okay. Just giving him some human connection and support seemed to improve his energy and pain a bit. As we spoke, I tried to figure out how to help him. There was a hospital nearby but he couldn’t walk, I didn’t want to leave him alone, and I didn’t have my phone to call for help. I said to myself, “Give me a sign of what I should do,” and a minute later a young man approached us, said he’s from the retirement home a block away, and offered his help. Thank God! He brought the man a wheel chair and said he would get him the assistance he needs. I felt the old man was in good hands and I left the scene. But I felt really disturbed by peoples’ lack of empathy. No matter how “good” a person you fancy yourself to be, the entire world is in your psyche—the good, the bad, and the ugly. If you don’t process your deep issues, and prefer instead to deny the factual existence of your shadow self (greed, selfishness, hurt, trauma, jealousy, fear, rage, egotism, vengeance, laziness, weakness, cowardice, etc), you necessarily project it onto others, seeing it exclusively as THEIR issue. The privileged people ignoring the old man saw him as “weak and helpless”—the opposite of how they strive to see themselves. They were simply unable to recognize these painful feelings as aspects of their own psyches. The unprocessed shadow is the most dangerous element in the world. Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychologist, predicted World War II years before it happened by analyzing 100s of people’s dreams in which he could see the collectively suppressed shadow self transmuting into a dark monster. The bad people in the world are a part of you and so a
