There’s a lot in you that’s neither being carried into this persona system nor into your ego, as part of what you perceive as “you.” Just opposite to the ego, buried in the unconscious, is what Jung calls the shadow. Now, society will give you a role to play, and this means that you’ve got to cut out of your life many of the things that you, as a person, might think or do. These potentials get shunted down into the unconscious. Your society tells you, “You should do this, you should do that”; but it also says, “You mustn’t do this, you mustn’t do the other thing.” Those things you’d like to do, which are really not very nice things to want to do, those get placed down in the unconscious, too. This is the center of the personal unconscious.

The shadow is, so to say, the blind spot in your nature. It’s that which you won’t look at about yourself. This is the counterpart exactly of the Freudian unconscious, the repressed recollections as well as the repressed potentialities in you.

The shadow is that which you might have been had you been born on the other side of the tracks: the other person, the other you. It is made up of the desires and ideas within you that you are repressing-all of the introjected id. The shadow is the landfill of the self. Yet it is also a sort of vault: it holds great, unrealized potentialities within you.

The nature of your shadow is a function of the nature of your ego. It is the backside of your light side. In the myths, the shadow is represented as the monster that has to be overcome, the dragon. It is the dark thing that comes up from the abyss and confronts you the minute you begin moving down into the unconscious. It is the thing that scares you so that you don’t want to go down there. It knocks from below. Who’s that down there? Who’s that up there? This is all very, very mysterious and frightening.

If your personal role is too thin, too narrow-if you’ve buried too much of yourself within your shadow-you’re going to dry up. Most of your energies are not available to you. A lot can get gathered there in the depths. And eventually, enantiodromia is going to hit, and that unrecognized, unheeded demon is going to come roaring up into the light.

The shadow is the part of you that you don’t know is there. Your friends see it, however, and it’s also why some people don’t like you. The shadow is you as you might have been; it is that aspect of you which might have been if you had allowed yourself to fulfill your unacceptable potential. Society, of course, does not recognize these aspects of your potential self. You are not recognizing these aspects of yourself either; you don’t know that they’re there or that you have repressed them. If you think of the self as a great circle with a center, and you think of consciousness as well above that center, then the ego is up in the center of consciousness, and the shadow would be way down opposite in the deep unconscious. The shadow is interred down there for a reason; it is that aspect of yourself that your ego doesn’t know about, which you bury because it doesn’t fit how you perceive yourself to be. The shadow is that part of you that you won’t allow to show through, that includes good-I mean potent as well as dangerous and disastrous aspects of your potential.

रौशनी के डर से, मैं रातभर जागा हूँ!
ख़ुद की परछाइयों से, मैं ताउम्र भागा हूँ।

“People say they love truth, but in reality they want to believe that what they love is true.” -Robert J. Ringer