How do STS-beings meditate?

[Asolsutsesvyl]

Carl Jung pointed out that "people do not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious".

I like to think that a bullet proof way of determining one's chosen polarity is to identify whether the trend is to accept and love their own shadow side, or to control and suppress their own light.

"Any mind complex distortion which you may call emotional which is of itself disorganized, needs, in order to be useful to the negatively oriented entity, to be repressed and then brought to the surface in an organized use."

Like you pointed out, for the STO entity the shadow must be confronted and made conscious at one point.

It can be much trickier than that, from what I know. How people care, what the sense of meaning is rooted in more deeply, and how they relate to others - I think that's more fundamental. Inner conflict, and struggle with what is found unacceptable in oneself, can go on in the long term in people with positive souls.

Actually, negative people seem to have it much easier, in terms of a simpler pattern of inner division and conflict, while positive people, because they care more about things beyond the self, can become far more neurotic. (At an extreme, it's the difference between the psychopath who always feels good except when desires are frustrated or external control is thwarted, and the neurotic wreck who lives miserably with an overflowing of empathy and concern.)

There are those who control the self consciously in order to control others, and there are those who, consciously or unconsciously, control the self in an outwardly disorganized way. In a positive person, self-control and repression don't translate outwardly in the same way, and often simply mean that blockages exist.

The point is that there's not two, but more, patterns of dealing with the shadow. And in long-term development, there can be several distinct stages, intermediate stages being filled with self-conflict.

An unconventional psychiatrist, Kazimierz Dabrowski, developed the "Theory of Positive Disintegration", systematizing the long, multi-stage journey of positive development, where many reach the earlier stages of conflict but far fewer go beyond it to re-integrate the psyche according to a personal ideal-structure which has developed. The following is a very short summary:

Level I: Primary integration. The majority. Some simply don't deal with a conflict, instead just living out the darkness in self-love without understanding. More are rigidly socialized, their inner worlds constrained by the rules of society. The "third factor", neither biology nor society, isn't actively directing life.

Level II: Unilevel disintegration. The most common crisis stage. People plummet into confusion, ambivalence, and existential anxiety, with disorganized inner conflict. If it extends for a long time, then psychosis or suicide may result. Most fall back to the previous level, some end negatively, some move forward.

Level III: Spontaneous multilevel disintegration. Some begin to develop a multi-level sense of meaning in the midst of the crisis, turning the inner conflict into a struggle between the higher and the lower.

Level IV: Directed multilevel disintegration. Some make the inner restructuring process consciously driven, re-examining life in all aspects from the new foundation. The prosocial becomes individual and authentic instead of dictated by something external.

Level V: Secondary integration. A few bring the process to completion, the result being a new harmony in which what is valued is consciously lived.

In short, the work of "making the darkness conscious" depends on something positive having been built, which can enlighten the darker parts of the person. It often takes years of intense inner conflict before that can happen. Thereafter, a fuller and genuinely positive harmony can begin to encompass the whole of the psyche.