Answering a question regarding Shadow work
A comment I made on the Islamic Theurgy and White Sorcery list to a question about shadow work and cognitive psychology in Islam
What do you think fikr, muraqaba and muhasiba actually are in Sufism then? Even the khalwa (40-day retreat)? Many modernized Sufi orders - let alone mainstream mosque culture - have turned their backs on many of these once enshrined practices in the world of Sufism and, in order merely to survive and self-perpetuate their names, have thereby turned their corporatized organizations into happy-clappy feel-good clubs without anything further. But fikr (reflection), muraqaba (contemplation) and muhasiba (introspection) as precise psychological and pneumatological tools and sciences of the Sufi orders are designed precisely for the kind of shadow work that Jungian cognitive psychology only talks about theoretically because none can move into the integrative Light of wholeness without going through the darkness of the shadows of the psyche first. In other words, and as literally all the schools and their masters once recognized, the wayfarer cannot move into Paradise without going through hell first.
For example, the precise science that some of these orders developed around the use of the Asma'/Names, when to use them, and what types should use them and for what purposes, was the active toolbox of the Sufi tariqas for a millennia until Western capitalism and (post)modernism in the Muslim world literally changed everything, and esp. with the rise of political Islam that, among other things, rejected such sophisticated psychological/pneumatological approaches and ended up infecting Sufism throughout the Sunni world itself with complete rubbish in the name of erecting some amorphous social identity in confrontation with the West (with the irony being that political Islam then felt more comfortable and at home in the materialist world of Western psychology and psychiatry than these hieratic practices). But these practices mentioned were once quite widespread throughout the Muslim world and were even far more sophisticated and advanced in both their practical and theoretical applications than even Jung and his school.
Besides, Jung does not believe in an ontology whereas Sufism does. Jung's shadows and archetypes are merely self-generated mental projections of an individual mind whereas in the psychology/pneumatology of Sufism there is a lot more going on to these than just an individual mind projecting these shadows and archetypes to itself. Although some of Carl Jung's more serious esoteric studies - like his *Aion* and *Psychology & Alchemy*, among others - are excellent works, nevertheless they still suffer from both a practical methodological as well as theoretical flaw and bias that is very Western in orientation, very materialist and extremely solipsistic: a flaw and bias that these once vibrant sciences in Sufism did not suffer from, never mind that once these sciences in themselves were mastered, it was only then that a given wayfarer or Sufi would begin the study of magic and Theurgy properly since Theurgy and magic are a branch of applied metaphysics and (its intellectual content to one side) metaphysics itself cannot be properly integrated without dealing with psychology and epistemology first (a reason, among a dozen, why, for instance, the guided use of entheogenic plants can prove so helpful, and why some Sufi orders secretly integrated these plants into their practices of fikr, muraqaba and muhasiba, and why I have openly done so). One reason for this is that magic and Theurgy don't really even begin to make proper sense before a given wayfarer has mastered, or at least come to understand, wholistically the contents of their own mind and the layers associated with it.
