Discourse 22: Breaking the Dark Horse
Journey into the Shadows I
This first Section is an excerpt of a larger conversation found in Discourse 5: Walking and Talking with God. This essay also touches on concepts from Discourse 4 as part of the same overall conversation of learning how to reign inside oneself. I felt this topic needed to be highlighted as this has been a common struggle for people, including myself, for half of my life. Too many people deny their own dark horse exists or they think it is something they need to psychologically purge from themselves. Some think they must kill it to have spiritual growth, when in reality they need to understand it, master it, then utilize it. Here is the excerpt from Discourse 5 where Plato sets our stage:
“In Plato’s Allegory of the Chariot, he explains the tripartite nature of the human psyche. This chariot is pulled by two winged horses, one of which is mortal the other is immortal. The mortal horse is obstinate and deformed. He describes the horse as a “crooked lumbering animal, dark in color with grey eyes and a blood-red complexion; the mate of insolence and pride, shag-eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur.” The second horse, the immoral one, is noble and true, “upright and cleanly made… his color is white, and his eyes dark; he is a lover of honor, modesty and temperance, and the follower of true glory; he needs no touch of the whip but is guided by word and admonition only.” Driving the horses is the charioteer, charged with reining the disparate steeds, guiding and harnessing them to propel the chariot with strength and purpose. The destination is the ridge of heaven, over which the driver may behold the Forms: essences of things such as Justice, Beauty, Wisdom, Goodness, and Courage. Pure knowledge and truth. These essences are what provides the horses with a lift in flight. In the allegory, the charioteer joins a procession of gods led by Zeus on this trip over the ridge. Unlike human souls, the gods’ horses are both immortal and are much easier to fly, without the turbulence of a mortal horse. While the white horse wishes to rise, the dark horse desires to pull the chariot back towards the earth. Pulling in divergent directions, the human driver struggles against the reins, attempting to get them in line. The chariot rises and falls as the struggle ensues, allowing the driver to catch glimpses over the ridge before falling again below the horizon. If the driver is able to behold the Forms, he gets to go on another revolution around the heavens, but if not, the wings of the horses’ wither from lack of nourishment causing them to crash into one another and fall to the earth. Consequently, the soul becomes embodied in human flesh.
The degree to which the soul falls, and the “rank” of the mortal being it must be embodied in, is based on the amount of Truth is beheld while in the heavens. Likewise, the degree of the fall determines how long it takes for the horses to regrow their wings and take flight once more. Essentially, the more truth beheld by the charioteer on their journey, the shorter the fall from grace, making it easier to regroup and begin to rise again. Plato describes this as looking “through the glass dimly.”
The charioteer represents man’s reason, the manifestation of our soul’s free will. The dark horse is that of our corporeal self, and the white horse, our spiritedness, or our spiritual selves.
The job of reason, with the assistance of the white horse, is to discern the best goals to pursue, and then to train his “horses” to work towards those goals. Naturally, for this to be the case, the driver must have vison and purpose, with a destination in mind. To achieve this, the charioteer must understand the nature and proclivities of his steeds if he wishes to harness them. The master charioteer does not ignore the desires of his steeds, nor does he permit them to run wild. He lets reason rule, identifies all of his desires, and from them selects his best and truest ones, those that lead to virtue and truth, and guides the horses towards them. Achieving this harmony of the soul, Plato argues, is a precursor to tackling any other endeavor of life:
“Having first attained to self-mastery and beautiful order within himself, and having harmonized these three principles, the notes or intervals of three terms, quite literally the lowest, the highest, and the mean, and all others there may be between them, and having linked and bound all three together and made of himself a unit, one man instead of many, self-controlled and in unison, he should then and then only turn to practice if he find aught to do either in the getting of wealth or the tendance of the body or it may be in political action or private business, in all such doings believing and naming the ‘just and honorable action to be that which preserves and helps to produce this condition of the soul”
Plato continues:
“The foundational nature of gaining mastery over ones soul is the chief reason why it should be our main concern for each of us, neglecting all other studies, should seek after and study this thing- if in any way he may be able to learn of and discover the man who will give him the ability and the knowledge to distinguish the life that is good from that which is bad, and always and everywhere to choose the best that the conditions allow.”
For a person who has labored to build themselves whole, having broken and trained their own steeds, for the one that has chosen to make such a pursuit his goal, to guide his actions and thoughts “will gladly take part in and enjoy those things which he thinks will make him a better man, but in public and private life he will shun those that may overthrow the established habits of his soul”.
In this way, we should learn to make ourselves and stand firm in that creation, defending our “established habits of our soul” both in the light of day as well as in the darkness, when no one else is watching except for our God.
How do we get to this place where we have a fortress around the established habits of our soul and the courage to keep them?
How do we tame this dark steed?
The first step is realizing the devil is inside all of us, as we are both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Humans are capable of both great and wonderful things as well as terrible and relentless evil. We must learn to be a master with vison and purpose to steer our chariot true. But to do so, we must not deny the existence of our darker reality, or we will be constantly struggling against the reins and find ourselves pulled back down to earth far away from the ridge of the heavens. The second step is understanding and internalizing that you cannot kill or tuck Mr. Hyde into the depths of your psyche without serious consequences.
To be a master charioteer, all things, even if it is just within your own headspace, must be brought out into the light and confronted. Anger, lust, envy, pride, and a cornucopia of other dark animalistic impulses are innate to our human psyche to varying degrees within us all. Recognizing and accepting these hidden parts of ourselves does not mean we acquiesce to them like a slave, but we master them by staring them in their face. A similar example is like the difference between a peaceful man and a harmless one. The peaceful man is capable of great violence but chooses not to be, whereas the harmless man does not have a choice. However, that knowledge of that dark power gives the peaceful man quiet confidence and a steadfast fortitude as he is guiding his own chariot. Other men who are not harmless but are impulsively violent are slaves to their dark steed and they will trample on everything around them that is good and just. But the peaceful man has broken this steed and guides it to the design of his own reason, obtaining the power to respond instead of reacting to the journey of life. In this manner the charioteer is capable of seeing over the ridge of heaven.
Some have called this process shadow work, which often stems from the Jungian concept of integrating the shadow. Carl Jung believed that it was essential to face and integrate the shadow into one’s conscious self to achieve greater self-awareness and individualization. I have spoken at great length about the importance of individualization as it relates to spirituality as well as the concept of building oneself whole. Integrating the shadow, or taming the dark steed, is a necessary component of that process.
This dark mortal steed encompasses not only our predispositions of our base animal nature, but it also contains our injuries, scars, hurts, wounds, and our pain that we have encountered during our life. (Pain is necessary for growth – a concept I will expand on in a future essay about Job). To that end, it must be understood that one cannot tame their dark steed once and expect it to comply with all of the master charioteers demands for the rest of his mortal life. We might find ourselves with the ability to control our steeds for a time, gaining a glancing view over the ridge, only to be met by a unique challenge presented by life experiences which damage our wings causing us to fall from grace.
Perhaps you thought you had mastered anger until something new happened and you found yourself consumed by rage, or that you thought you had tasted the depths of pain and loss... until something new occurs that transcends the depths your previous knowledge. During these moments the dark steed slips its reins and acts under its own volition, moving back to the green untrained state. Previous shadow work begins to evaporate as you tumble back down towards the earth.
This is a cyclical process that never ends during the course of our life. We rise to the ridge under full command only to be hit by something new and unexpected. Each time we must revisit our understanding of our dark steed and then reintegrate that knowledge into our training of it, by knowing what causes our shadow to emerge on its own. Each time we learn new ways to calm and subdue it, so in the future we can respond and not react.
We can achieve this by applying Gibbs Reflective Cycle that contains six stages:
1) Description of the experience
2) Feelings and thoughts about the experiences
3) Evaluation of the experience, both good and bad.
4) Analysis to make sense of the situation.
5) Conclusion about what you learned and what you could have done differently.
6) Action Plan for how you would deal with similar situations in the future.
The weight of this concept rests on how we perceive events that occur in our lives. We must come to terms with the fact that we cannot control all things that happen to us, but we can control how it is that we react to those events. That is if we are striving to be our own master charioteer. Otherwise, not only will we be a slave to external events, but we shall also be a slave to our own dark horse.
Each time we fall away from the ridge, if we are pressing ourselves back upward each time looking “through the glass dimly”, learning to control our demons, the degree of the fall becomes smaller and smaller. This is a relentless task to master our steed and become who it is we were meant to be, but it is a necessary one in order to see over the ridge of heaven and establish the habits of our souls. It takes courage, faith, and as always, a bit of grace.
“How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also if I am to be whole.”
-Carl Jung