Trying to integrate the shadow, bewildered and stunned

I was going to post this on the old Breaking Open the Head forums, because I've gained a lot from them even though I came to them about 5 years after they stopped being really active, to pay my respects to the challenge and the inspiration of the forums, but the registration software is no longer working in the forums or doesn't work on my laptop. So I'll post this here. I guess it's kind of a cry for help, but maybe the process or integration I'm describing will be useful to people in this community, because I've read a couple of essays describing people's (strained) relationship with military service, and how they're recovering from it or how the military represented certain things for them in their path, and hopefully my story will have meaning for some of them, because it's a relationship that I also struggle to understand.

Personal background: a lot of the Western hermetic tradition is possessed by the archetype of the Magician, the solitary heroic protagonist in his circle directing the cosmic forces by force of will & intellect, etc. I used to be possessed by it as well, but then my heart opened about six months ago and I realized how all the 'manipulating the cosmic forces' stuff is a load of crap, that I resonate more with the image of the fool, whose gesture of surrender and joy and clarity defines my path and the essence of what I am.

My heart opened, I'm not really sure why, it doesn't seem like the personal efforts I was capable of making at that time towards meditation and spiritual practice (they were very cerebral) could have allowed space for or facilitated this kind of opening, but anyway it happened, and things have been great since then, I've been inhabiting this space of joy and abundance, and the universe has seemed unshakably abundant and joyous since then. My best friends in the world, whom I met when I was in college, seem to have always had incredibly open hearts, and it had gotten to the point where I felt like a wolf around them, because I had burned myself out on an intellectual quest for absolute truth (realizing finally that what people call the Absolute - naked awareness - can't be found intellectually) and then enlisted in the Marines because I didn't care anymore and surrendering to the big war machine seemed like a gratifyingly nihilistic move. It was gratifying, and the reconnaissance training I did was the purgatorial experience I think I needed. But anyway, I don't feel like a wolf around them anymore, I understand the power they have in being as vulnerable and open and beautiful and compassionate as they are. I had already been making some progress in transforming my own community in the military, which for the most part is comprised of angry young men with heavy emotional armoring. Most of them are in fact just big teddy bears, but they've learned not to show what they perceive as weakness and having unconsciously sought initiation into the mysteries via the military in a culture that is more or less totally nihilistic and failed to find it they're kind of doing damage control. OK, so it's easy to give compassion and hugs etc. where they're needed when one has enough of a connection to the source to be able to connect to it somewhat volitionally.

Some stuff that came up in the past couple of days. I saw the movies Tron and Black Swan, both of which deal with attempts to integrate the Jungian 'shadow.' I'm not as big on Jung as I used to be but I respect the terminology and map apparatus he made, so I'll use his terminology. I was wondering why all cinematic depictions of this process that I can think of (Fight Club, etc.) always depict it as being overwhelmingly and wildly catastrophic and destructive. It seems like it's a question of awareness, of whether one is possessed by the activation of the destructive energy and gets trapped in an elaborate self-destructive spiral or whether one can, with compassionate awareness, harness and integrate and liberate the energy and turn it towards transformation. I had some kind of revelation about my relationship with my own shadow, which is my job, or more specifically the psychic space that I learned to go to during the training we did, which helped me to endure certain aspects of it like cold, exhaustion and sleep deprivation. I wrote about it in an email to my friend, he had asked me what I thought the difference was between someone identifying with the warrior archetype on a purely archetypal level, and someone who fights in the armed services in a waking world conflict; I said the difference was in their relationship to mortality, it's more visceral for the second person. This space, which I learned to go to during moments of intense physical exertion such as long ruck runs (running for 8 or more miles with a heavy pack is damaging enough to the body that the metabolic effects are probably similar to those produced by self-flagellation, i.e. a lot of adrenaline and dopamine), is a kind of euphoria or a controlled fury, which shuts out awareness of cold and exhaustion. 'In the back of my mind there's what I think of as a child soldier, living in this space of intense clarity and joy, ready to do the work he has to do. I don't know why it's a child soldier.' I had a vision about a tarot deck that I want to make, the Marine Corps Tarot, the Chariot as up-armored HMMVV with raptured turret gunner on top, the Empress and Emperor as Laura and George Bush, the Fool as a recruit getting his head shaved or as a recon Marine on the high knee in a 360 degree security halt with his team, the characteristic liberation and joy in his eyes, etc. I want people to be able to see the sacred or sacrificial or initiatory aspects of war.

Over the course of a few days I had been experiencing several major synchronicities in which people around me, such as an old lady at McDonald's, referenced the idea of the guardian angel. My primary spiritual discipline is centering prayer which I direct towards awareness of the angel, the ubiquitous HGA of ceremonial magick.

So yesterday, as I was picking a friend up from the airport and heading back to base, and while talking to my friend about Black Swan, how it was a difficult movie to watch, to be helpless while watching another person suffer so much, I started to speculate out loud why all cinematic depictions of shadow integration that I can think of (Fight Club, Black Swan, many others) depict the process as being destructive. And as I was beginning to voice this speculation, I looked at the GPS that I had in my car and either misread it, or else the GPS was incorrect in its road overlay, and I looked at it a second longer to try to clarify my confusion, and in that second or two seconds I ran a stop sign and hit a Dodge Ram that was going 55-60mph. Nobody was hurt, thank God, but if the timing had been even a little different, then the Dodge would have hit the driver's side door of my car, and at the very least I would not be walking right now. After he had taken everybody's statements the state trooper looked at me and said: 'Do you believe in guardian angels? You better pray to yours... I don't know how your car didn't get hit on the driver's side.' I felt strangely joyous the entire time, glad nobody was hurt, not at all upset that my car is totaled, and unsurprised by the comment about the guardian angel.

I was more shaken by it than I realized at first, however, because I keep asking myself why I was spared. Obviously, given all the synchronicities surrounding this and the fact that, somewhat improbably no one was hurt, it was a manifestation of the angel or this destructive personal energy that I had been becoming aware of the day previous. Ever since I enlisted, part of me has wanted to die in the war, because it would a kind of consummation or union, the mythos of the young dying god etc. whose sacrificial death renews the world etc. etc., and yesterday the universe basically said, look kid, your life isn't yours to sacrifice, what happens is the will of God or Brahman or Infinite Mind, accept this. And now I feel like I'm in one of the afterlife bardos or something, I went for a run today in the woods behind my barracks and my mind balks, trying to accept the impermanence of being able to be aware of the trees and the sky when if God had willed it, I wouldn't be walking and breathing and eating anymore but in the actual dream of dying. And still there's this tremendous reservoir of energy or fury or whatever it is I tapped into, as if anything I touch might burst into flames. I don't know why I was spared, why I'm still living in the dream of this world.

I had been planning to start a spirituality group in Jacksonville, the military town outside of Camp Lejeune, NC where I'm stationed, based primarily on centering prayer, to try to gather together individuals with opened hearts. Of course there's always groups of New Age types and there's always New Age teachers, and love & light are great and I could have attached myself to this type of group, but I've always felt like a lot of these people are running away from and denying their problems. I could buy a new car, I could maybe even get my miata fixed, but I'm not motivated to do either of these things, it seems as though the universe is telling me I should forget the distractions of all the culturally literate things as well as all the culturally illiterate things I had access to with a car and just go inward and run in the woods and work out in the gym, turn my body into a better weapon, because render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and practice advaita. OK.

I had dreamed about getting in an accident a couple days ago. I had another dream about another Marine in my platoon getting a DUI, which I told him about, he said he took it as a sign and that night he left his car out in town rather than drive it back. Last week I had a dream about reading a fantasy novel in which the protagonist meets his guru. 'And then the Teacher came into his life, and nothing was ever the same again.' Maybe my luck will hold, and that will turn out to have been some manner of (even self-created) prophecy too.

I realize I probably just need to continue quietly with my path, because these are manifestations of whatever turmoil or transformation is in my psyche right now, successful manifestations, but I was wondering if anyone here had any advice for integrating destructive personal energy or energy from the shadow. I would say I need a hug, but this is an online community, so I'd settle for and greatly appreciate any insight anyone has in working with the shadow. I was about to write, 'the personal shadow,' but I suppose that in an ultimate sense people are archetypes inasmuch as we are all part of the same wave or fractal or dance which is reality, and my issue is also an attempt to address or redress the collective error and stupefaction and disgrace and lack of groundedness and spiritual being which the archetype of the warrior has currently fallen into via its manifestations as, among other things, the USMC.

May everyone in this community be empowered. Happy New Year.