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The Collective Shadow — disguised as Covid 19

Faye Leister
9 min readApr 13, 2020

With the various theories currently circulating about the origins of the Coronavirus, I’ve been curious to explore how many people are writing about the virus from a completely different perspective — through the lens of Depth Psychology, looking at current events through the Jungian concepts of the Collective Unconscious and specifically the Collective Shadow.

Having had a long term fascination with Carl Jung’s writings, as well as my training in Psychotherapy and other related subjects, I naturally use the concepts of Depth Psychology such as the collective unconscious, the shadow and projection, to try to gain insight into my own life experiences, as well as to understand the outer world. However, to my dismay, upon searching ‘The Corona Virus and the Collective Shadow’ (and similar) in the hope I would deepen and expand my understanding from a psychological viewpoint of the current world situation, I was surprised to find only a handful of videos and articles looking at this world crisis from the perspective of an expression of the ‘collective shadow’. And even with the very few I did find, the insights were so general that they were even missing the gigantic elephant in the room — which for me was quite disturbing.

To anyone who isn’t familiar with Carl Jung, he was one of the founders of Psychology, along with Freud. Although his work was considered by many to be too metaphysical and mystical, the fact is, his work, along with Freud’s is the foundation from which all Psychology, Psychotherapy and Counselling sits upon. Many of his theories and the terms used to describe his concepts have become so popular that they are now used by the general population. Terms such as Introvert, Extrovert, Synchronicity, Projection and Shadow are now words used in everyday language. The Myers Briggs Test, commonly used in corporate environments to place employees in the most appropriate vocational roles is also based upon Jung’s concepts. Two of Jung’s main concepts — The Collective Unconscious and the Shadow (both the individual shadow and the collective shadow) are ones he wrote about extensively throughout his life and have also remained foundational to Psycho-dynamic Therapy. If you’ve ever been to a therapist, you may have experienced working with this understanding of the human psyche in therapy.

In individual Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, especially with a Jungian slant, the therapist will be alert to what issues the client brings to therapy in the present time, as being a symbolic expression of something that has happened in the past, usually childhood. The understanding is that what is presenting itself as a challenge now reflects something in the past, what is above reflects something below, what is without reflects something within — everything is connected, nothing exists in isolation. Everything that happens ‘to us’ from the outside, is reflecting something inside us — and often something of which we have no conscious awareness.

And so it is also that when examining the dynamics of a group of people, these same mechanisms operate — whether that be a group of five, one hundred, a whole nation, or the whole human population of the planet.

The contents of the unconscious contains anything that has been forgotten and or repressed; anything not permitted to integrate into the conscious personality — and these can be positive as well as negative psychic components such as personal qualities, talents, dreams, desires, nightmares, fears, terrors, hatreds, psychic toxins. The darker aspects form ‘The Shadow’. In Christian terms this could perhaps be understood as inner sin or evil. It is not always the shadow which is projected outwards in the mechanism of projection (positive aspects of the psyche are also projected), but the shadow is one of the psychic components that can be, and does get projected if it becomes dark enough, strong enough, big enough.

What does any of this have to do with the Coronavirus?

In essence, the collective shadow is the combined shadow of every human on the planet. And it has remained in darkness and growing deeper, darker and larger for a very long time.

Imagine the collective shadow as an invisible but very real potent energy force made up of every individual’s shadow. Imagine this locked up in the underworld, under the earth, or even as the force inside a volcano. If we go with the volcano scenario, we could picture a mountain above the ground that we can all see, but there is a growing pressure inside the mountain of the lava bubbling, and the majority of the population are oblivious to its existence and potential danger, going about their daily lives around the mountain with no awareness of what is inside and what is about to occur. Sooner or later, the pressure builds to such a level that it can no longer be contained, and the volcano explodes — leaving everyone in complete shock, and catastrophic death and destruction in its wake.

Sensitive people can feel the collective shadow; are aware of its existence. This is why many people have had feelings, insights, dreams, that something big was coming this year (2020). Jung himself viewed the World Wars as expressions/projections of the collective shadow and he was so intuitive that he dreamt of and sensed the war drawing near way before it was evident to others. Those of us attuned to Mother Nature, the environment and the animal kingdom, knew that we were reaching a tolerance point, or had actually reached it some time ago and were now at a cracking point. I have been aware of this collective shadow rumbling since the mid-1980s, and over the past fifteen years have had a general constant feeling as well as several intense and more specific intuitions (and direct experiences with The Divine Feminine/The Divine Mother/Gaia, during numerous breathwork sessions) communicating to me that this collective shadow was ready to erupt into the upper/outer world; something was imminent.

As with an individual shadow, this collective shadow can stay buried for a very long time, but sooner or later either the shadow contents become too massive for the ego (in an individual) or societal structures (in the mass population) to contain, or there is a trigger which cracks the ego/societal structures, and the shadow will break out, and will ‘project’ itself onto something or someone outside of itself. It can be projected upon a person, a partner, a group, a political party, a religion, an entire race of people, a species of animal, women, men, a company, an accident, an event, or even a virus; it can be anything. This ‘projection’ will then (seemingly mysteriously) be experienced outside of ourselves — the shadow/darkness/evil is no longer inside in the deep dark recesses of the unconscious but is suddenly outside of ourselves in a form we do not recognise as anything relating to ourselves.

From this Jungian perspective, in relation to the coronavirus, we are experiencing the sudden release and projection of our dark collective shadow — we are seeing what has been hidden inside of ourselves collectively. And this makes no difference whether the virus started in the diabolical wet markets in Wuhan or any other hell hole battery farm or slaughterhouse anywhere else on the planet, was accidentally or intentionally released from a laboratory in China, created by the One Percent, Bill Gates, the Luciferian Elite, the Archons, Aliens, or any person, organisation or group which have been suggested by the numerous theories floating around at the moment (even the theory that no such virus exists). From this deeper viewpoint of examining the collective shadow, it’s irrelevant where it came from and how — the relevance is that ‘it is’ and that it is confronting us, causing fear and suffering and impacting everyone on the planet. The container has now cracked and the shadow is out. It was going to happen somehow, and start somewhere by some means. Just as it erupts in an individual’s life when the shadow contents become too huge for the ego to contain, the unconscious will find any way to create a weakening or a crack so that the contents can spill out. The means, the method, the circumstances are irrelevant to the unconscious — any means will do to serve its purpose.

So now what?

Governments, politicians, medical professionals and most of the general public are now focussed on how to stuff this shadow (toxic killer virus) back down into the collective unconscious — get rid of it out of our lives, get some medicine to kill it, create a vaccine to stop it; we want it gone. And of course, we do need to deal with the outer manifestation if we want to survive this however we need to go so much deeper than dealing with the outer symptoms if we want any long term healing. If we only stuff this virus/shadow down without a radical collective transformation, without the forming of a new paradigm, leaving the old toxic paradigm of ‘Dualism’ — exploitation, commodification and domination of ‘The Feminine’ (the term is being used here in the philosophical sense) behind, it will only be a matter of time before another even more aggressive virus, environmental catastrophe or war emerges. If we don’t deal with the shadow and integrate it, it will just be repressed again, and if we do not learn and transform as a result of this meeting with our collective shadow, the next projection may be an even greater catastrophe than this.

To get to the root of the problem we need to first ask, ‘what is this collective shadow?’

What is it doing to us? What are its characteristics? How is it relating to us? Answer: It wants to kill us, it is toxic, it is scary, it is creating panic, fear, death, destruction, confinement, isolation, lack of freedom, depression, desperation, separation of loved ones and families, loss of meaning and purpose, pain and death.

We then need to trace these experiences of the shadow back to ourselves. In what way has every individual on the planet (to varying degrees) been creating fear, death, panic, destruction, confinement, isolation, lack of freedom, depression, desperation, separation of loved ones and families, loss of meaning and purpose, pain and death to others — whilst continuously pushing this reality of this deep down into the unconscious, and maintaining this condition through the mechanisms of cognitive dissonance so cleverly and deeply conditioned into us from childhood? In what area of lives are we doing this on mass on a daily basis, without any conscious thought, and therefore unconsciously colluding to form a deep dark collective shadow so toxic that it is capable of wiping us off the face of the earth?

The answer to this also reveals the solution.

It’s right in front of us every day in the meals that the majority of people on the planet consume one two or three times a day, without making any connection to what it is we are doing. Our collective shadow is formed from the mass violence, terror, pain, and desperation of ‘The Feminine’ — the animals and the environment; the cries and screams of agony of our animal brothers and sisters — 70 billion land animals (bred into existence by humans purely and purposefully for their flesh as a commodity) per year and rising, and trillions per year if we count sea animals) whose terror goes completely unacknowledged and ignored every single second of the day, the absolute devastation to the environment that results from this — the massive monocrop production, in particular soy and corn, 80% of which is produced to feed factory farmed animals, the completely wasteful feeding of much of the earth’s food crops to fatten the billions of farm animals, instead of being fed directly to hungry and starving people in third world countries, the destruction of the Amazon Rainforest to graze cattle, and to grow soy crops (for animal feed). We have been exploiting, abusing and destroying Mother Nature — her earth and animal kingdom for a very long time.

The collective shadow is the desperation, despair, and rage of Mother Nature/Gaia.

Mother Nature /The Divine Feminine has had enough suffering and can no longer tolerate the abuse. She is now letting us know. Will we listen to her?Will we recognise that what is outside of us and attacking us in this form of ‘the virus’’ is the externalisation of an unconscious, unacknowledged aspect of ourselves that needs to be brought into the light of conscious awareness and transformed, or will she have to continue to scream even louder to make us stop?

— For anyone interested in looking much deeper into this subject, a comprehensive explanation informed by history, sociology, psychology philosophy and spirituality can be found in the book ‘The World Peace Diet’ by Dr Will Tuttle, specifically the chapter ‘The Domination of the Feminine’.

The documentaries Dominion and Earthlings capture the essence in raw visual form.
Dominion documentary https://youtu.be/LQRAfJyEsko
Earthlings documentary https://youtu.be/3XrY2TP0ZyU

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Faye Leister

I am an Artist (painter at the moment) who has a long term interest in Philosophy, Metaphysics, Astrology and Jungian Psychology.