Owning Your Own Shadow

World War II gave us endless examples of shadow projection. One of the most highly civilized nations on earth, Germany, fell into the idiocy of projecting its virulent shadow on the Jewish people.

There is a Hindu proverb: “Anyone who thinks he is enlightened certainly is not!”

Jung has said that to be in a situation where there is no way out, or to be in a conflict where there is no solution, is the classical beginning of the process of individuation. It is meant to be a situation without solution: the unconscious wants the hopeless conflict in order to put ego-consciousness up against the wall, so that the man has to re

The more refined our conscious personality, the more shadow we have built up on the other side.

Everyone knows what a mandala is, even though mandala is a Sanskrit term borrowed from India and Tibet. A mandala is a holy circle or bounded place that is a representation of wholeness.

What happens to the left-hand side of the balance if one does not keep it conscious and give it honorable expression? Unless we do conscious work on it, the shadow is almost always projected; that is, it is neatly laid on someone or something else so we do not have to take responsibility for it.

We are all poets and healers when we use language correctly. One makes a mandorla every time one says something that is true.

The shadow: What is this curious dark element that follows us like a saurian tail and pursues us so relentlessly in our psychological world? What role does it occupy in the modern psyche? The persona is what we would like to be and how we wish to be seen by the world. It is our psychological clothing and it mediates between our true selves and our

Men lay their shadow upon women, whites upon blacks. Catholics upon Protestants, capitalists upon communists, Muslims upon Hindus. Neighborhoods will make one family the scapegoat and these people will bear the shadow for the entire group. Indeed, every group unconsciously designates one of its members as the black sheep and makes him or her carry