For an exploration of how to lead a fuller moral life, you will have to go to the crowded shelves under Spirituality, Religion, or Self-Help. Disciplined contact with spirituality's deeper levels of meaning and goodness has a healing and transformative effect on the self. This contact comes through specific practices such as Zen meditation to attain loving attentiveness, solitude in nature to give a sense of interconnectedness with all of reality, breathing and focusing exercises to calm the mind and reach the sacred, and exercise routines to produce equanimity and balance. The shadow functions as a subpersonality with drives and values that contradict our public persona. Earnest attempts to redress social injustices, for example, will falter if they are prompted by unconscious projections of painful childhood memories and fears onto authority figures.
Political divisions remain intractable when they are driven by unacknowledged resentments.
For example, the intensity of emotion that immigrants evoke in many Americans far surpasses the economic impact of immigration. When people complain that we are being swamped by a tidal wave of foreigners, often the underlying issue is the white fear that immigration by people of color threatens America s very identity. Until that fear is addressed, the battle over specific policies such as welfare benefits for immigrants or expelling the children of illegal immigrants from school will never end. But since ethical discourse on these policy issues takes place at the conscious and public level, it often neglects the obscure yet powerful energies that skew perception and camouflage our actual intentions. To deal with these unconscious forces, Au and Cannon suggest a number of specific practices of centering and meditation that direct attention to transcendent sources of beauty and goodness.