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These words are not my own and I take no credit for them. I share them here as a resource for anyone seeking personal growth or as source material for their own creative expansion of the collective.
The shadow is a living part of the personality and therefore wants to live with it in some form. It cannot be argued out of existence or rationalized into harmlessness.
Recognize your shadow instead of projecting it onto others. 'This is your unique contribution to humanity's quest for love, justice, and peace.
Though I became increasingly aware of the beauty of the bright daylight world where "golden sunlight filters through green leaves," at the same time I had a premonition of an inescapable world of shadows filled with frightening, unanswerable questions, which had me at their mercy.
Sometimes the shadow is powerful because the urge of the Self is pointing in the same direction, and so one does not know whether it is the Self or the shadow that is behind the inner pressure.
Whether the shadow becomes our friend or enemy depends largely upon ourselves… The shadow becomes hostile only when he is ignored or misunderstood.
…there is an additional disadvantage in projecting our shadow. If we identify our own shadow with, say, the Communists or the capitalists, a part of our own personality remains on the opposing side. The result is that we shall constantly (though involuntarily) do things behind our own backs that support this other side, and thus we shall unwittingly help our enemy.
In dreams and myths … the shadow appears as a person of the same sex as that of the dreamer.
It is particularly in contacts with people of the same sex that one stumbles over both one's own shadow and those of other people…. Although we do see the shadow in a person of the opposite sex, we are usually much less annoyed by it and can more easily pardon it.
… the shadow is exposed to collective infections to a much greater extent than is the conscious personality.
In some aspects, the shadow can also consist of collective factors that stem from a source outside the individual's personal life.
When interest turns elsewhere, it leaves in shadow the things with which one was previously concerned, just as a searchlight lights upon a new area by leaving another in darkness. This is unavoidable, for consciousness can keep only a few images in full clarity at one time, and even this clarity fluctuates.
the shadow cast by the conscious mind of the individual contains the hidden, repressed, and unfavorable (or nefarious aspects of the personality. But this darkness is not just the simple converse of the conscious ego. Just as the ego contains unfavorable and destructive attitudes, so the shadow has good qualities, normal instincts and creative impulses. Ego and shadow, indeed, although separate, are inextricably linked together in much the same way that thought and feeling are related to each other.
The shadow is not the whole of the unconscious personality. It represents unknown or little-known attributes and qualities of the ego - aspects that mostly belong to the personal sphere and that could just as well be conscious.
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