by Ralph Miller

Steven King, in an interview, was once asked about the source of his inspiration for all of his lurid tales. The article was really very enlightening, and his response to the question has always stayed with me. He responded by talking about the wolf hour. He described the wolf hour as the times when you wake up in the middle of the night with an absolute chilling feeling of being alone.

When you have a true sense of your complete aloneness; you are almost always confronted with death itself.

You would love to wake your wife, partner, girlfriend who is sleeping soundly next to you, but you don't; or if you live alone you would love to call your best friend on the phone. Just as that thought comes into your head, you are looking at the clock radio as it flips over to 4:17am (can't call George this early …), and the cold of your loneliness (death?) brings a new rebounding wave of its chill.

Your mind/thinker takes you to issues of your health. "My left arm was so sore yesterday morning." Or, somehow you are able to have a perfect visualization (in 3D, with CAT-scan accuracy) of a pulsating, throbbing and ever-weakening aneurysm at the base of your brain.

"A week more to live," you say, matter-of-factly to yourself, trying to ignore the words you are hearing.

This is where Steven King finishes and my own mind takes over. The full assault comes, without warning.

Judgment.

Our minds condemn us as we think, "If I have to die (next Friday), I have so much that I did not do that I wanted to do. I have been a miserable human being, with all my lies; all my deceit and manipulation."

Crows?

Or, "I lied like a used-car salesman to my husband, when we were talking about my business trip to Chicago yesterday." Or perhaps, "Oh, god, I have tried to be good, but I have failed." As fast as you are making excuses for yourself, you are feeling the light of your own truth and perception shining in the recesses of your own consciousness. Your memory of all your bullshit queues up with military precision.

On a fence?

On the horizon of your inner vision, you notice a fence running across a wasteland, with a few birds (crows --- they look like crows) roosting on the fence. You watch as more crows settle down on the railings.

The light of your own divinity offers the key to the encryption to the metaphor. "The crows are the lies, the deceptions, the manipulations and the flaccid excuses."

Lies, like crows sitting on a fence.

I look at the clock radio again, and it reads 4:21am. Wolf hour is a long fucking hour, only 56 minutes to go.

So the way I see this whole human drama breaking down, is that there are two and only two major traps for mankind, and therefore me as an individual. The first is judgment. What is judgment really? An opinion. A belief. The second has to do with truth and integrity, the absences of which are lies, deceit and manipulation. Lies feed very nicely into judgment, because if you have a belief (believe a lie) about something, that belief is based on a certain perspective (or lie.)

For example many people judge the human body, and human nakedness as being somehow inherently perverse or evil. From the rules and morals of the religious right, to the staid conventions of old money Americana, the uptight, self-righteous attitudes run the gambit. What about the upper middle class American family who suddenly finds out their all-American athlete son is gay and wants to quit the football team? Repressed sexual feelings, and the quirky and situational morals we have developed as humans are remarkable.

The American public, by a vast majority, judged Bill Clinton for his sexual trysts with Monica Lewinski, while a majority of Europeans scratched their heads, in amazement as they watched the repressed American sexual psyche play itself out. European leaders who overtly flaunt their mistresses, wonder in amazement as they watch an admired, and obviously multi-talented leader who could handle blow-jobs and important calls at the same time, be crucified by the American public.

So we are all supposed to come down on one side of this opinion or the other. We are supposed to judge? Why?

Basically, judgment is man's core disease or original sin. We judge others in order to prop up our own insecurities; or perhaps in order to hold on to a bitter grudge. Our judgments can turn into hate. Our judgments of others always have a reflection inwards, and we judge ourselves as well.

Our judgments pointed inwards are about our shame. We are ashamed of parts of ourselves. We all harbor a shadow self in the basement of our psyches. This shadow-self is like an unwanted child that suffers from neglect. It is a part of ourselves that we deny exists; it is a part of ourselves that we do not love and accept.

I am not up for this. We either choose to judge or we can choose to not judge. If we are not going to judge, then there is nothing we can judge. So that pervert; that murderer (bastard…) who we exiled to the basement; we deny he exists. When people came over to our house and ask us, "Don't you have another child?", we persist in denying that despicable creature lives in the basement of our souls.

No, no, no I will no longer do this - I cannot.

"Abandon the separate concepts of holiness and unholiness. Then all the people will be benefited a hundredfold. Abandon the separate concepts of justice and humanism, and all the people will return to a state of harmony. Abandon the cunning and cleverness of the mind, and people will cease to rob and deceive one another. These things are based on artifice and are thus inadequate to express the natural virtue of wholeness. Hence, return to the true self to embrace only the one, unadorned nature. Refine personal preference and desire. End the endless search for segmented, intellectual knowledge, and set your mind above worry and vexation. In this way, one may restore one's unity with the perfection of one great universal life."

- Lao Tzu, Hua Hu Ching

I recently met a friend from Belgium who is very much like me. He grew up seeking the affection of women, and at the same time had much difficulty believing in love. I felt for much of my life I was searching for love, that I didn't even really believe in. I am not sure why I did not believe in love. Perhaps I did not think I was loveable. My sexuality drove me for sure, and I know I grew up with some judgments about that.

Making the decision to no longer hold judgment about anything is a redemption of your soul, and this is a story of redemption. Redemption, has become a hackneyed term in English. You hear 'redemption' your entire life in church and from the talking-head preachers dishing out their judgment on TV and the radio. What exactly is the message that you hear?

"Repent from your sins."
"Don't drink alcohol."
"Don't curse."
"Don't have lustful thoughts."
"Don't lust 'after' a woman."

It is interesting to note that in the context of the 'don't lust' biblical monologue by Jesus, he did not exactly instruct against lusting. His main bone of contention was about lying and deceitfulness, and the judgment these dudes were dishing out. In the passage, he told his self-righteous inquisitors, "You have heard, thou shall not commit adultery, but I say to you if you lust after a woman it is the same thing as committing adultery." Jesus was incensed at them for their self-righteous treatment of prostitutes and the like. He was also showing them what a pack of liars they really were. And, he was condemning them for judging others.

I believe an easy way to understand shadow is by looking at our sexual desires.

What do men do?

There is a part of a man that is completely preoccupied with sex. A man seeks love through his sexuality. The mystery of love is somehow hidden inside of the strong sexual passions a man has. He is not ultimately seeking the satisfaction of sexual urges, as much as he somehow knows that his passions are a doorway to what he really wants.

Women have a different approach.

There is a part of a woman who is completely preoccupied with sex. A woman loves a partner and desires to express her love through her sexuality. Her fantasies can become interwoven with incredibly romantic stories, that end in that expression of love; her desire to love, being fulfilled.

Men have sex because they see it as a doorway to love and women have sex in order to express love they feel that they have found.

Sex is a mystical union. It can and should be the perfect expression of love.

But if we judge sexual feelings and repress them (hide them), they becomes a part of our shadow. The shadow-self is the hidden self ... so what ever we are ashamed of becomes a part of the shadow. We are taught from an early age, through the control of religion, and our own repressed cultural views, to judge certain aspects of human sexuality are deviant or taboo. Homosexuality, pornography, prostitution along with a host of other things are considered unacceptable, and in some cases outright crimes, as in the cases of antiquated sodomy laws that still exist in certain states in America.

Even though our sexual urges and fantasies are natural and normal, if we judge them as wrong, then we are going to feel shame, and they become part of shadow. This self-judgment is based on our conditioning. From this place of guilt, the shadow haunts us and the normal urges we have become repressed. The repressed feelings come out as 'darker' fantasies.

The fantasy begins with a lingering obsession of some sort. He begins to muse about a woman that he saw that particularly attracted his attention. His sexual fantasies have certainly run the gambit, from adolescent days of masturbating while looking at the women on the pages of Playboy and Penthouse magazines, to fascination with other forms of sexual stimulation (mostly visual) that present themselves to a young man. No matter what triggers it, he suddenly feels compelled to act on the fantasy.

There are varying degrees of how often men and women decide to act out on their fantasies, but everyone has the fantasies. Everyone has some part of themselves that they keep hidden ... a shadow self that even self-denial cannot eradicate.

Rather, the exploration of shadow (in full integrity) begins in first, accepting yourself (all of yourself) without any judgment. Then be open (again, in full integrity) with those who you love, so that they at least have the opportunity to 'not judge' you or your shadow. Risky behavior? Yes, by the world's tick-tock standards. In a marriage or a loving relationship, the perverted little shit becomes someone who is cared for by you and your beloved. Amazingly, his cravings can be welcomed, and transformed, and in full harmony with those cravings of a loving partner's own shadow-self.

"Stop judging others, and you will not be judged. For others will treat you as you treat them.
Whatever measure you use in judging others, it will be used to measure how you are judged. And why worry about a speck in your friend's eye when you have a log in your own? How can you think of saying, "Let me help you get rid of the speck in your eye," when you can't see past the log in your own eye? Hypocrite! First get rid of the log in your own eye; then perhaps you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend's eye."

- Jesus, Gospel of Matthew

So, where do we draw the line on judgment? Or, are we going to get it, that there is no line? Hitler is a favorite whipping-boy in these discussions. What Hitler did was despicable beyond words. But can I judge it? No. If I judge Hitler, I might have to take a look at my own country --- 70,000 Iraqi corpses rotting in the desert (killed in 37 days or something) and countless Iraqi children dying every month because they can't get medical treatment, due to US oil sanctions. Suddenly I am the judge of everything and it eventually comes right back to me and my own shadow.

Judge the shadow and you put yourself right in hell … TODAY. Free yourself of all judgment, and the meaning of the words of Jesus, in the Gospel of Thomas can be understood. "You seek the kingdom of my father saying it is here, or it is there. But, I tell you that it is right in front of you, and spread out on the earth, and you do not even see it."

© Ralph Miller 2002