Shadowrider - Field notes of a psychonaut

By George Pennington

Many people have asked me: „George, do you believe in life after death?“ Well, I don‘t know what happens after death. No one ever came back to tell me about it. But what I firmly believe in is a life before death. This is not a matter of course. On the graves of many people we could write quite truthfully: Died at the age of 52, buried at the age of 75. That is what happens when the shadows win. And, as I see it, our task as humans is not to let this happen. Facing and riding our shadows is a good way to avoid this fate.

A Psychonaut, a modern portmanteau of the Greek psyche (soul) and nauthes (sailor), that is, a sailor of the mind/soul, is a person who experiences intentionally induced altered states of consciousness in an attempt to investigate his or her mind, and possibly address spiritual questions, through direct experience.
Goals of psychonautic practices may be to answer questions about how the mind works, improve one‘s psychological state, answer existential or spiritual questions, or improve cognitive performance in everyday life. (Wikipedia)

George Pennington, born 1947 in the USA, spent most of his life in Europe (Austria, France, England and Germany). During his studies in Heidelberg he became fascinated by psychological issues. He spent his entire life investigating the human mind and wrote several books on related topics. In 2005 he produced a popular TV-series on the Soft Skills. Now he lives in Bavaria where he works as a Soft-Skill-trainer and coach.

• Language: English
• Publisher: George Pennington
• Release date: Feb 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9783945947005

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

THE MAGIC WORD AND WHAT IT MEANS

I woke up with a strange word in my head. It drifted around the edge of my drowsiness with the annoying persistence of a thirsty mosquito: Shadowrider… Shadowrider… Shadowrider…. It took a while until I could clearly discern it against the still slightly foggy background of my slowly awakening mind. And then it struck me like a thunderbolt: The word meant me.

A panorama opened up in front of my inner eye. Shadows I had encountered during my lifetime drifted in and out of my consciousness, lonelyness, darkness and pain I had known paid me a short visit as if to illustrate the word. I guess a young Indian who in olden times was given his warrior-name by the circle of elders must have felt just like I did. Shadowrider was my name, my true identity, my purpose, my life. I had not known it until this moment. I had just ridden my shadows.

After the lengthy learning phase of my prolonged adolescence riding shadows had become quite natural to me. And for a long time I was naive enough to think that shadowriding was a common experience that I shared with all or most men and women, a perfectly natural way of dealing with the darker sides of life. Looking closer, however, I found that most people were quite good at pretending the shadows weren’t there. They could not fool me though. I could see the shadows in their eyes, the fears they avoided by making reassuring noises in their heads, the tears they avoided by pretending everything was all right, courage also, but not so much the courage to face their shadows, just the courage to keep going in spite of them. Hardly anybody dared to face the darker sides of their mind. What I had learned to do myself seemed rather rare among the people around me. So with time I learned not to speak too much about it, confiding just in a few friends who, like me, were shadowriders.

Right there, still in bed, I realised that the word was also the name for a book that had been waiting inside me for the moment of its birth. I had felt it grow for quite a few years, making odd appearances now and then in my mind, but not ready yet for coming out into words and onto paper. This had been a frustrating state of affairs. I knew that I needed to write not only about my own experiences, but about life in general, how to face it and how to handle its more difficult aspects. But until now my thoughts about it had been rather foggy and disjointed. Shadowrider, the magic word I had woken up with, suddenly brought it all together.

I guess it is time I started explaining what I mean when I speak of shadowriding. Life offers us a mix of ups and downs, of surface phenomena and deeper realms, of light and dark, joy and pain, noise and silence. That’s the way it is. I remember a cartoon by Charles Schulz in which he lets Lucy (or is it Charlie Brown, I forget) say: „I just want ups and ups and ups." Unfortunately life doesn’t work that way. We must learn to handle the downs as well as the ups.

Of course we do our best to stack the cards in our favour. Money helps, sure, but it is no guarantee for those ups and ups, it doesn’t make us happy. It may make us feel a little more secure, more comfortable, but it can not prevent the darker moments from happening. And happen they do. There is no way of avoiding them. So, given our natural bias toward the brighter side of life, the question is: How do we handle the darker ones?

Watching clouds was one of my favourite pastimes as a child. In the ever-changing shapes I could discern all kinds of images, galloping horses, faces, animals, giants and gnomes and many other things. It was wonderful to observe a cow dissolving slowly into a medieval castle and that again into the face of one of my teachers. I loved this game, and I hear that it is still popular with kids today.

One day, however, I was not contemplating clouds but the bark of a tree. It was rough and structured with alternating light and dark patches, the ideal substitute for random cloud formations. And indeed I saw in it the distorted face of some monster leering at me from inside the tree trunk, so it seemed. I saw its eyes, the long nose which was bent to one side, its mouth an ironic grin, it even had a pointed ear that was bent as if to better hear what I might have to say. I was sitting in front of this strange face, staring back at it just as it stared at me. I did not move. Time passed… And suddenly I noticed that the face in the bark was slowly beginning to disappear, as if shyly withdrawing from my gaze.

After a while I could not see it at all anymore. I could not figure out where the eyes had been, even though they had stared at me wildly and unmistakably at the beginning. The pointed ear was nowhere to be found, and the nose might have been anywhere. I could detect a great number of shapes and forms in the rugged bark now, but none of them corresponded to the image I had originally seen so clearly. Where it had been there was now just bark.

Since then, I must have been around 20 years old, I have repeated this experiment many times, always with the same result: the longer I looked at something the less I could see it. I suppose the bark of a tree or the clouds in the sky are just surfaces onto which our mind projects its own images, images that seem to need looking at. Once that need is fulfilled the projection is no longer necessary and the image vanishes. The mind obviously needs to generate a certain amount of attention for its images. And when this need for attention is satisfied the projection ends.

The same applies, so I have learned in many years of observation, to all mental imagery. Since we have no difficulty in looking at the more pleasurable images the mind will store and accumulate the ones we successfully avoid, the darker ones, the shadows, for looking at later. It stores these unpleasant images in the area we call the subconscious. And from there they will be projected onto the surface of our consciousness as soon as a suitable occasion arises. The images themselves are, as a rule, not all that unpleasant. They become unpleasant only through the unpleasant emotions we associate with them, emotions we want to avoid. So with time the subconscious takes on a certain likeness to a cellar that is never cleaned, in which all the accumulated mental and emotional muck is stowed away and left to rot - in the hope that there will never be a day of reckoning, just like in the song: „…catch the fox, put him in a box and never let him go". And so he stays there, the fox, the dark, dangerous and feared entity, in the depth of our mind, lurking, waiting…

I was told about a distant uncle of mine (I never met him in person) who was a real gentleman, well bred and brought up in a noble family. He always behaved impeccably and never uttered an impolite let alone a dirty word. Until he reached the age of sixty-five. Then he began having strange fits of what the medical profession calls coprolalia (Greek copros: excrement, lalia: speech). For about fifteen minutes he would insult his family, his servants and anybody who happened to be around with the filthiest language imaginable, having absolutely no recollection of his outburst afterwards. I can understand this phenomenon very well. Having denied himself the use of any words not suitable for the fine tongue of a gentleman, having denied himself the semantic shadow as it were, he had stuffed all his potential for filth and abuse away in the depths of his subconscious. With age he became incontinent. It seems quite natural when you look at it this way.

The same applies to any images and feelings that we are not willing to face: pains and fears, traumas, anger and the like don’t just disappear when we successfully cover them over with activity or mental babble: they remain latently active in the depth of our subconscious ready to pounce on us whenever a suitable projection surface gives it occasion to do so. While we are young our efforts to pretend they are not there may be quite successful. When we get older, however, our ability to pretend may diminish - resulting in our becoming a grumpy old hag or bastard as the case may be. We have seen it happen to others. But few of us realise that the same fate is likely to befall any of us if we keep denying our shadows.

HOW THE SHADOWS FUNCTION

The remedy is just as simple as the psychological principle outlined above: stop avoiding the shadows. We can observe that small children who have not yet been socialised have no difficulty facing them. Any pain will make them cry and scream, sometimes so much that we fear they may be seriously harmed for life. A few minutes later they will beam great smiles at us - just as if nothing had ever happened. Emotions are energetic phenomena. And like any other kind of energy they want to flow, to e-mote (from the Latin emovere: to move out). And just like any other kind of energy the emotions will not just disappear if they are not allowed to flow. They are stored away in the body, usually in the form of muscular tonus, and in the mind where they create a corresponding mental tonus. Stress is the word we use for this phenomenon. Let me give you an example.

David, a friend of mine, an ophthalmologist, was visited in his practice by a Turkish woman with her child, a five year old girl who had a tremor in her eyes, i.e. she was not able to keep her eyes still. They would flutter incessantly at high speed, unable to rest or to attach themselves to an object. David asked since when this had been so. The condition had started six months ago, he was told by the mother who spoke for the child. The next - and obvious - question was: „What happened six months ago? The mother answered that nothing special had happened at that time, at least nothing that had anything to do with the eyes of her daughter. When David insisted that there must have been something she said that her mother, the child’s grandmother had died six and a half months ago. But surely this death had nothing to do with her daughters eyes. David turned to the little girl and asked: „Do you miss your grandma very much? whereupon the child started to cry. Immediately the mother tried to calm the child by scolding her not to make such a fuss. David had to ask her not to intervene when he spoke to the child, otherwise he would have to send her out of the room. With his words he succeeded in making the un-cried tears of the girl flow freely for about twenty minutes. When the crying finally subsided the girls eyes had stopped fluttering. Her gaze was calm and focused as it should be.

In this case the mother had kept her daughter away from her dying Grandma. No goodbyes had been said, no tears of grief had been allowed. Children know very well what dying is all about, and the girl had been denied the tears of parting that come naturally to any of us when a loved one dies. So the un-cried tears had built up a pressure, an inner tension, that made it impossible for her eyes to keep still. Energetically speaking her tears had built up a pressure of, figuratively speaking, 20 joules wanting to come out (to e-mote), while her mother’s insistence on not making a fuss had motivated the child to invest another 20 joules of counterpressure to keep them in. Just try pressing your fists together with a certain amount of force for some time: after a while you will notice your arms beginning to tremble. Very much the same had happened to the eyes of the girl.

This is just one example of many. Emotional energy doesn’t just vanish if you choose to ignore it. It remains where it is, stored away as muscular and mental tension, ready for discharge as soon as there is an opportunity. The fact that we tend to ignore or repress the more unpleasant emotions leads to a slow but steady buildup of undischarged energy that can become cumbersome, definitely unhealthy, even dangerous. As time goes on the shadows deepen.

I have also witnessed the discharge of accumulated laughter. The man in question had grown