Lurking shadows

When the Shadow is ignored, it becomes insistent about popping up in your life. If you do not acknowledge that you do indeed think and feel some "awful" things sometimes, those thoughts will show themselves in subtle ways. You might lose your temper when someone does something to you that seems petty or inconsequential. You might sabotage your own business deals for seemingly no reason. Every person has a hundred things that he or she does to mess things up sometimes, and later these people kick themselves for it. Ever have that experience?

For a while, I have been trying to figure out an answer to one of my questions I posted a while back. The question was: Which is correct? Should we actively do Inner Self work and try to clear out our emotional baggage, like my former teacher, Draja Mickaharic, says? Or should we not worry about that at all and simply become aware of our baggage and give it the space to exist in the light of Consciousness, like Eckhart Tolle says?

After exploring some of this material on Integral Philosophy, I think the answer is both.

If we only take Eckhart's approach, we will certainly become more aware, but our baggage will still be there. In the grand scheme of things, it certainly does not matter whether it is there or not, however, Ken Wilber's teachings stress that we are not just Consciousness, we are all things on all levels. That means we are our baggage too. So from that perspective, by doing Shadow work or Inner Self work or whatever you want to call it, we are in a way lubricating our path towards becoming more aware.