The following is a transcription of a video interview conducted by Poppy de Villeneuve for the film Shadows:

ABDI: We're living in a time where things are changing so rapidly. There's more connection/disconnection than anytime in history. This sense of alienation has never been stronger. That's a really fertile ground for a shadow to hide. From that place, there is a lot of havoc. So, all these suicides that we've been seeing recently, and not just in terms of people who are famous, which is obviously what gets attention, but just a lot of people annihilating themselves - it seems that they actually can not match their own myths.

It's very important not to jump into judgment which we often do as a culture just to decimate someone's life because of something they did in a moment of desperation. But, in my experience, the suicide piece raises the issue of where we actually have these masks and these stories in place. We service them. For most of us, our whole lives are based very strongly on having certain ideas of who we are - the pieces of ourselves that were loved as young children. And, we constantly go out there and perpetuate this myth. And now with social media and celebrity culture, all of it has become this thing.

What we're seeing in our society right now is a dissociation from ourselves. We don't have a core. So, when life throws a huge curveball at us, we actually have nowhere to go. The real tragedy here is not just the loss of a single life, it's also how we are actually not living. These perpetuated myths of ourselves are stories being lived out, and we're servicing the stories at a high cost. It's very difficult if not impossible to dismantle the story unless you actually heal the mask. And it's not that you heal the mask, you heal the thing that makes you want to wear a mask. Let's say I get a third degree burn on my face as a child, and I'm ashamed of that burn. I put on a mask to hide my face because I feel I'm grotesque. And then I can have some kind of healing work that makes me feel comfortable with this burn or has some kind of feature that heals my face so I'm not as ashamed of it. That's what allows me not to wear a mask. That's where the healing comes. But, we live in a culture. All the culture really does is just make the mask more shiny and, in my experience as a clinician for a long time, pain is the first step to the removal of the mask.

I don't really see somebody wanting to remove the mask unless there is pain involved. It's that failed relationship. It's that failed thing that we thought would bring us love, or vice versa - actually getting the thing we thought would make us happy and then not being happy. But for most, it's pain. Pain is actually not acceptable in this culture because part of the promise of the mask is that you will feel no pain. The mask's function is that you actually will feel nothing, but you will confuse that "nothing" with joy or a sense of happiness. Actually, though, people aren't in their joy and happiness.

Once you put that mask on - just think of a mask in front of your face - you can't see anything, you can't taste anything, you can't eat anything. So then you take the mask to the next level. The culture that we are living in is both responsible for us wearing a mask and it's also a product of the mask. So, one can be very cynical and be like, "Well, it's just about money and Big Pharma makes money by pushing these meds”. That's definitely true, but there is something underneath that which is the unconscious of the culture which is actually the masses not wanting to feel pain. So, it's interesting to think that a culture decides it's okay and yet it's not okay. Pain is not okay because when you feel pain, it's going to mitigate some kind of moment towards questioning the mask, removal of the mask. Is the story real, or is there something beyond the story?

Everyone feels something is up but we can't put our finger on it. The whole adage "you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free" is a very real thing on a psychic/psychological level. You either wake up, or you're gonna get really crushed. That is where the shadow is. See everything has a price: you can suppress something for so long, but at some point it will come to the surface, and we are more interested in being perfect than being real.

Let's start with the premise that we are deeply flawed. If we start with the premise that there is nowhere to get to, we start with the premise that we are actually here in the moment to experience very specific things. That also really helps everything flow better. We're living more in hyperspace right now. We are living more in the story than ever. We don't really have to relate anymore, which is why the social media thing is such a perfect reflection of what we are all unconsciously experiencing. It's the perfect mask designed as if it's not a mask. Social media now has become the perfect way of not connecting as connection.

We need to learn to tolerate these feelings. The mask is an externalization, a materialization of this fear. Sitting here as adults talking about this stuff, we have to feel what we are saying here. This is not some mental intellectual exercise. As a matter of fact, the mental intellectual exercise is a way of not feeling these feelings because they make us feel so vulnerable, and we don't wanna feel vulnerable. The dialogue starts with just sitting with ourselves and feeling these feelings, and they are very hard to tolerate. The bottom line is just learning how to tolerate this discomfort. Most people that I talk to feel like they are not fearful or they might just be fearful of one little thing. They don't realize that for most of us anxiety and fear run everything. Everything. So just having that conversation with oneself honestly shifts everything. We have to really deepen that connection with ourselves and not run from it externally. We should not mainline this love.

Start figuring that relationship out. You are nothing. You are everything. And you wanna walk between those two lines. But we can't control a whole hell of a lot. On the biggest level, what we can control is our reaction to our events. Roll the sleeves up and actually have a relationship with self, the quiet space of just sitting and really feeling. The arrogance of this culture - when you're arrogant and you think the world owes you something, that's actually because underneath it you feel totally worthless. Of the people I meet, the majority don't have this quiet silent sense of "I'm here, I have a right to be here, not more than you not less than you". That's why these shadows are so important. This is not some "ohh, let's just move out of the culture and look at our shadows”. Everything that's happening on the planet right now is because these shadows aren't being dealt with.

Part of our culture and this whole New Age-y thing has become that if you just hope it enough, it will turn out that way. Why is that? Because the mask has insured that we actually don't take the mask off. So, it keeps saying, like, "Let's put some layer of lacquer on this mask, it'll be a little bit more firm, it might be a little bit more tight, but it'll work, it'll turn out well, just trust me on this one”.

Blame is very interesting. It connects with the hope that if everything is your fault, then you are in total control of the world, and because you are in total control of the world, well you can do anything, so if you're not doing it - you are to blame. It's very interesting because when I treat successful people - unless they have suffered a lot, they have fuck-all compassion for everybody around them because they blame other people for not being able, and that's totally a defendant mask. It's protective but it's a sense of: it's really your fault. And what's happening right now with politics? If you're poor, it's your fault. If you are going to prison, it's your fault. And of course, there are always things one can do and take some responsibility for, but certainly you can not tell me that if you are born into a family whose parents make a million bucks each that you can really compare yourself with somebody who's born into a family where the parents make $30,000, but people actually do and honestly believe that to be truth.

There is a piece there which is not dealing with reality. Responsibility is like "okay, so I'm a product of these genetics/emotions/marriage of these two people, it has given me huge blind spots, it has given me some gifts, and now it's up to me what I make out of this”. Now I'll take myself, for example: I can blame myself for many "failed marriages" and have shame around them, or I can be like "well, actually, I was working through those things, and it took me so many decades to get to a place where it's not that”. Blaming is amazing because right away it brings up people's own shame and right away goes to the shaming-blaming. So, it's again a matter of not being okay with the process.

If you are doing the same thing a thousand times over, you need to look at that. Even then, you are not blaming. You are just so unconscious that you are not seeing it, so blaming is very strange to do because we are all in this relationship, we are all involved in that. It's very easy for people to always blame their partner, "Oh, she's such a this, or he's such a that,” but it's always a 50/50 responsibility.

The curse and sort of promise of the modern Western world is hyper-individualization. Part of the problem with hyper-individualization is a lack of connection with everything around us. Part of the gift of it is that you really get a sense of self-connection, and you can actually practice experiencing that aspect of self. Whereas if you are not hyper-individuated, you are in this culture where everyone minds everyone's business. People are on one level interdependent but not independent. As a reaction to that aspect of culture, we've become hyper-independent, but now we are actually suffocating because there is no oxygen in the realm of hyper-independence: we are missing the experience of connection.

The dance with this is how you actually keep that independence while working on being interdependent. There is so much distraction available right now that we have no time to feel. Going back to the mask - you actually have one very important part of this: to de-mask you need to have some time, some space of just hearing yourself.

Now, from the second we wake up, we are totally wired into culture. On one level it's amazing, and on another level it's very, very destructive because we don't have a sense of who we are. So the curse of it all, the curse of the unintegrated shadow is that we are externally referent. Another way of saying it is if you want the mask to come off you have to become internally referent. The inner compass has to start working.

To me, the strongest people who create strong bodies of work, whether they are artists or healers, are people who are internally referent, and they are different because there is a softness in them. Again, going back to that thing of being arrogant: that's actually from someone who is so wounded - they are very hard. They can with their will power make stuff move around, create millions of followers or millions of dollars but there is a hardness in them. You don't get that feeling of softness when you are around them. It's about having enough of that internal confidence of just being like "hey, this is right”.

I always think about times like Nazi Germany and how millions and millions, in addition to Germany, millions of people around the world went along. And you had these families that just knew that, "Hey you know what, whether that person is homosexual or that person is Jewish or that person is a Gypsy, it's the right thing to do to put this person in my basement and hide them, even though it is going to get me and my whole family killed”. That is the internal compass. And this is where it comes full circle now. We've created this consumptive world because we have such a hole in ourselves. We can turn it all around by having internal responsibility. The hyper-individuated person sees that softening and melting of the ego wall as death, when in fact it's actually a softening so they can be interrelated to everything else, which is really what they are craving.

Find that little wounded boy or girl inside of you and hide them in your basement from the Nazis of your mind and the Nazis of your friends' judgments and the Nazis of the culture's judgments. That's it: find some shelter for that poor little scared boy, poor little scared girl, and love that child just by giving it even half an hour a day. I'm not gonna go beg for love on some fucking social media thing. I'm not gonna whore myself by putting more debt on a credit card. I'm gonna do something that I love that actually might not get any kudos from anyone.

We disconnect from reality from thinking all the time. That thought process has to be looked at, felt. You can't think yourself out of it - we always want thinking answers to our thinking problems. Just feel the feeling. That takes practice to tolerate because it feels so overwhelming. Once you tolerate that, it actually shifts. Tolerating that actually makes it, on a very deep unconscious level, totally permissible to have those feelings, and then you don't have to actually act them out. Thinking is a way of disconnecting from emotions. It is really helpful to step away from thinking at least a couple of minutes every day, and that's very hard to do. It's a muscle you have to develop, but then you start seeing what's underneath.

You can have hours and hours and hundreds of years of thinking about this stuff. It doesn't touch anything like the feeling underneath. So, I would say start with parenting yourself, but to start parenting yourself means that you actually have a sense that you have a self. That there is this little boy or girl that wants to be loved. Again, it's very easy to be ashamed, and we talk like all of this social media can make you feel ashamed and "why am I getting on that?” No, we are on this planet to play. Get on your Instagram and share… and get on Facebook. Beautiful. Do it from a place of strength, not from a place of weakness.

At the end of the day, the majority of us aren't going to be remembered when we die. Part of this whole celebrity thing is we want to be remembered so badly. We are not going to be remembered. But at least let's connect with ourselves and a couple of people around us. So at least leave that imprint. That is huge.

I still remember, as a 50-whatever-year-old man, the kindness of people when I was three or four years old. I'm talking about an act of one person looking at me and putting their hand on my head. It's informing the man that I am - so I can put my hand on the head of thousands of people and just love them because somebody did that for me when I was hurting. These things are huge. The little acts are profound.

This transcribed interview was published in The Know: Cultural Almanac Issue #0.