Introduction to Shadow Work

Dream Journaling And Mantras
A recommended method of developing good dream recall is to write down all the dreams you remember when you wake up each day (if this is possible). A good strategy is (if your life allows this) to train yourself to lie still and keep your eyes closed each time you wake up, and think only about the dreams you can remember. Most people immediately open their eyes, get up, or at least start thinking about the events of the day ahead and what they need to do. That's a sure-fire way to immediately sever the tenuous connection with the dreams of the night before. Once the conscious mind engages strongly the dreams (products of the unconscious) fade rapidly and are forgotten.

But if you repeat a mantra to yourself each night, several times as you lie in bed—something like "When I wake I lie still, eyes closed, and remember the dreams" it should take effect after a few nights or maybe a week or so. I used to always keep a notebook and pen beside the bed for scribbling down what I can remember when I do open my eyes (only after carefully repeating to myself, in words, each dream or fragment of a dream I can recall). And if I was trying to change my behavior using a mantra then I would write that mantra in the dream journal at night. That seems to solidify the intent more powerfully.

Unfortunately most people need to get up with an alarm and don't have leisure time to lie there thinking about dreams most days.

I've trained myself to recall the dreams and tell them to myself in words in detail before opening my eyes, and that secures them in my memory well enough that I can fire up the computer and type them up, no need anymore for a notebook. It took me years though to get to this point.

What the Shadow really is and how it is created
The shadow isn't only things you're afraid of, but also that you're embarrassed or ashamed of. Actually that's still a little too vague. It consists of those things that you don't want to admit are parts of you. So you split them off and pretend like they're not there - using mechanisms like denial, repression, and projection. Well projection is always associated with the shadow I think - in fact I would say anything that you project onto other people is a part of your shadow.

It helps to think of it like this - a shadow only exists because light is being cast, right? And some of it is being blocked by something. A cast shadow. Cast is another word for projected. The light is conscious awareness - it's sort of like a sun that warms and enlightens whatever it touches. But there are parts of the psyche that we are afraid or ashamed to cast full conscious light (awareness) onto, and those things we push around behind us so we don't have to see them and nobody else can see them either. If you're standing outside on a nice sunny day, you have a shadow right? So let's just say, for illustration purposes, that you're standing there and the elements of your psyche are objects sitting on the ground around you. No wait - not the elements of your psyche, we have to break it down farther to make this more clear. Let's say what's sitting around you are photographs of important events in your life - memories of events that shaped who you are.

In fact I think I can explain this better if I switch analogies. Rather than standing in a sunny field, you're sitting at a table looking through a pile of pictures of your childhood. There are other people in the room (there are other people in your life) who might walk up at any point and be able to see what you're looking at. So as you pull out each picture from the box, you either lay it right down where everybody can see it or sometimes, with certain pictures, you turn it face down or you stash it under the place mat or something because you don't want people to see that and understand that it's a part of you.

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These are pretty long, I better break the big ones up into several entries. Back in a flash with the rest of this one!

Shadow Pt 2
In fact, my mom used to talk about sweeping certain things under the rug. I remember conversations with her where she talked about this, and I used to picture her actually sweeping parts of her life under the rug, and I almost laughed because there was a lot she had to put under there, and I pictured people walking into her house and there's a huge cartoonish lump under the rug. They could all see it, but they kind of understood what it was, because of the way she acted - the way she'd freak out if anybody walked near it or looked at it, so they didn't do those things, in order to keep her relaxed and cool. This demonstrates the fact that often other people can see our own shadow better than we can - that's largely because they aren't trying to repress it but we are. Also because we have 'tells' - we start getting nervous or antsy when parts of the shadow become visible and people start talking about it.

So yes, it starts early in life when we decide there are certain things about us that we don't want people to see, and we hide them.

We form the shadow little by little, by deciding what we display proudly about ourselves and what we hide. Anything you hide becomes another part of your shadow. It keeps growing. And keep in mind, when we talk about the shadow as a personified figure, that's only a convenient way to describe it, and because parts of it are represented that way in dreams. A shadow figure is not really the shadow, just a representation of it. The shadow is an area in your psyche where you repress and hide things, and it is represented in dreams sometimes as a frightening or disturbing figure. This is because the way the unconscious and the conscious minds communicate is through stories - dreams are one of the ways they do it. And the stories use symbolism because the conscious mind operates differently than the unconscious - it's logical and linguistic whereas the unconscious is imaginative and intuitive. The root word of imagination is image, and that's what it means - the imagination consists of various kinds of images. This doesn't mean just still pictures - in psychological terms an image means a range of things - I think of it as something like an animated GIF with sound that also can include ideas, memories, and feelings. But just a brief little snippet usually - not like a whole movie but like a scene.

It's important to understand the difference between a dream and a movie. Dreams are the products of the unconscious, so they tell us how it functions, how it communicates with the conscious mind. A movie consists of only moving visuals and sound, but a dream also includes information - ideas, memories (real or false), and feelings. So it's in something like Sensorama . Oh, in fact, that made me realize - dreams also include all of the senses - smell, touch and taste as well as the big 2. So the pictures you were looking at in one of the earlier analogies - think of them as each including a little bit of movement and all the other elements I just listed.

In fact it goes farther than that. One of Freud's more brilliant discoveries was the association chain - the way one memory will immediately pull out a cascade of others that are closely related to it, usually through emotional content. If you remember (or dream about) some incident in your childhood that caused you embarrassment, it might also carry with it the memories of several other similar incidents that hold the same kind of embarrassment but that happened at different ages. It tends to work sort of like this - something has just happened in your life that triggered a cascade of associations. Maybe somebody called you a slut, and it reminds you immediately of several other events, all leading back to the original one, when let's say you heard your dad call your mom a slut loudly and angrily as he was accusing her of cheating on him when you were just 4. Maybe this event terrified and traumatized you. Partly because you didn't really understand it, but you knew it was something terrible, and it seemed like your family was destroyed by it. So maybe now the word is all tied up in anxious knots with terror, desperation, shame, and other emotions that you can't even name. You just remember so much anger and resentment between your parents, and so much crying and screaming, and you thought the family was over and done now and you didn't know what was going to happen to you, and it was all because of that one word. Or it seemed like it to you anyway. Maybe the family survived it, but that word and all the associations with it got pushed down into your shadow area - you never want to think about them again, and if they come up your reaction is instant and spasmodic - completely irrational and uncontrollable. You just get pissed off and hurt and want to cry uncontrollably, and maybe you don't even remember the original incident anymore - probably you've repressed that memory because it was too painful, and now you can't even really think clearly about it anymore because you get all irrational and emotional when you try.

Shadow pt 3
So now anything that reminds you of that incident - a certain angry hurtful tone of voice like your dad used toward your mom in that argument, or the shocked tearful tone of your mom in response, or any of a range of hurtful words he used like slut, whore, bitch, etc - especially if they're uttered in that angry resentful hurtful tone, just automatically bring up rage and fear in you.

Ok, back to the present. Let's say you have a dream one night with Jack Nicholson and he looks very angry and evil, and as you see him you just hear the word SLUT in the dream soundtrack. You wake from this dream terrified and upset, and for some reason you're thinking about a certain toy you had in childhood. If you analyze the dream, you might remember that the toy was in your hand when this argument took place, and it's a link between something that happened yesterday and the argument. Then you realize that yesterday a friend laughingly called you a slut - not seriously at all, and you didn't get mad or anything, but maybe subliminally the association was called up in your mind. And maybe you realize that in some way your dad looked a little bit like Jack Nicholson and during the big fight maybe he reminded you of Nicholson in The Shining, where he was horrible to his wife and child, so he made a good choice for this particular shadow figure.

There's no such thing as your shadow figure - the shadow really is a place where you push down your repressed memories, and it's also an archetype. Archetypes are generators of symbolic figures that can be used in our mind's stories (like dreams or thoughts), and those figures are custom tailored to a situation. Whatever the figure needs to represent specifically in a given situation (a given dream) that is what is chosen. In different dreams, when it represents a different association chain of memories and emotions, a different shadow figure will be chosen. The shadow figures themselves are only temporary representations.

Lol - I might have overdone it. And I'm not sure if you understand the mechanics of how dreams work. But it's important to have a basic understanding of these association chains. Something happens today that triggers a cascade of associations reaching all the way back to some original traumatic incident that caused you to repress some terrible event into your shadow, because you want to forget it and don't want to ever think about it again. Well, now that it's repressed it has a lot of power, and that power works against you. You don't even understand anymore why anything that reminds you of it makes you so upset (you don't know it reminds you of anything - it's repressed).

However, if you can work your way through the association chain and remember the original incident, then you're bringing the light of conscious awareness into the darkness and you undo the repression - you bring the content up into awareness and it loses that dark primitive power to inspire nothing but terror and shame and guilt. Now rather than an irrational reaction you can unravel the knots and untangle the memories and get your inner machinery working right again. This is analogous to lifting the hood on your car (it's dark under there) and fixing whatever is causing that terrible noise and making the car drive funny. You have to go in and do the work, fix whatever is wrong, even though you're afraid to go in there, and then the energy, rather than making the car wobble, will be helping it to drive properly now.

The Persona and how it relates to the Shadow
Ok, so that covers how the shadow is built up over a lifetime. It consists of a lot of these little moving images - snapshots of your worst memories with movement, emotion, senses, etc all intact, and they work like little dream images.

Now let's think about the persona.

Persona is the Greek word for mask, and in fact originally it meant the clay masks that performers would wear on stage. And that's exactly what a persona is - a mask you wear to cover your real face. In fact, that's exactly how I think of the persona - whereas the rest of these archetypes are deep inside the psyche, the persona is on the surface - in front of your face in fact. You wear it between your real self and the world, and the main reason is to hide your shadow. It's a compensatory device in a way. You're afraid if people see your real reactions to everything that little bits and pieces of your shadow might come through without your realizing it. So you put on different masks for different situations You have one you wear when you're hanging out with mom and dad and the family for Christmas or other family gatherings, and a totally different one you wear with your friends.

I don't know if you're old school enough to know the Beatles, but there's a great line from the song Eleanor Rigby that puts it into perspective: "Eleanor Rigby - puts on a face that she keeps in a jar by the door. Who is it for? All the lonely people."And this is what we do - we put on different faces for different occasions. Without them we'd feel too exposed and vulnerable.

Different situations will call up different aspects of your Shadow. When you're with your family for instance, you might not want them to see you cussing or talking about drinking or sex, but with your friends that stuff isn't a problem. So you wear a different mask with each. Of course this isn't deep Shadow stuff, but I think of it as being shadow related, because it's about how you want people to see you and what you want to hide from them.

Well that wasn't very much! Lol, I was afraid it would take as long as writing about theShadow, but of course once you understand the shadow and how it is our vulnerbility and shame and fear, the persona is pretty easy to explain.

The Jester as Trickster archetype (aka Shadow)
I don't know about the Trickster as a psychological archetype, but I do know it from a mythological or fairy-tale context. And of course that's basically the same thing.

One of the most well-known forms of the trickster is the king's jester. A king's court was a treacherous place, aristocrats back-stabbing and badmouthing each other, all vying for position and trying to curry Royal favor. They were absolutely merciless toward each other, using every manner of political intrigue and underhanded wheeling-dealing and forming temporary alliances to take down more powerful rivals. It was a lot like a reality show.

Well, nobody dared do anything like that to the king himself, or the queen or any of the highest royal entourage. They were treated with extreme deference and exaggerated respect. In fact the King was surrounded by bowing and scraping sycophants. So a king's lot was sad - nobody would tell him the truth if they thought it might hurt his feelings. Sort of like being a full-grown spoiled baby. And that's no kind of life! People in that situation get to feeling empty and like life is meaningless - everybody lies to placate him and he can't get any meaningful conversation, which requires a level of mutual honesty.

Enter the jester.

He alone can ridicule the King and the rest of the court. Someone with keen insight into human nature who was also funny. Today we have comedians like that who couch deep philosophical wisdom in jokes and sarcasm. Also writers, filmmakers etc.

So the trickster is those flashes of sudden cutting wit that reveal a sore spot, or comments that seem hurtful at first but turn out to contain much needed truth that you were not open to. After an initial spasm of anger or resentment, you will often recognize the wisdom and then hopefully accept it. Those who refuse to accept it have become too self-centered, too deep in denial - tyrants and despots. Every king needs his jester, and should listen to him, especially when the jokes cut deep. The jester keeps you humble when you've grown too high and mighty.

And this is really what the Shadow is - it presents those things you don't want to accept but need to in order to heal and get closer to Wholeness. But it doesn't usually try to be funny about it. However if you develop a philosophical attitude toward the products of the unconscious (dreams, fantasies, synchronicities, flashes of inspiration etc) you can learn to take an ironic pleasure in even its most seemingly hurtful messages - because in the end they are all meant to help. The medicine doesn't taste good, but it's what you most need.

Hold on - I just had a thought. Maybe the Trickster is one type of figure sent by the Shadow - perhaps there are different kinds. That would make sense. Sometimes they're frightening or somber, and sometimes they do seem sort of sprightly and funny. And those are the more likable Shadow emissaries.

I learned most of this from reading about the Fool card in a Paul Foster Case book called Tarot - a Key to the Wisdom of the Ages. Oh, and also another great book by Jason Lotterhand called The Spoken Cabala, which was based on the writings of Case and meant as an adjunct to it. Tarot cards represent Archetypes.

EDIT - actually I don't think I learned this from either of those books - I'm not sure exactly where anymore. But those are amazing books so I'll leave them there.

Question:
I don't remember why, but somewhere I think I picked up that Mercury, or Hermes is a trickster, that's got me all confused today. I think I must have autistic features, because it's bugging me that I can't remember where I read it, or where I put all my notes on it and that I can't resolve the issue immediately, right now, lol.

Something tells me the Trickster, like the Jester that you mentioned, shapes you all the way through the alchemical process (I say alchemical because I got it from reading about that, rather than individuation, or Jung, but it brought me here), from beginning to end, and in that way is similar or IS mercury / hermes.....or is it that I want it to be because that would simplify things..

Response:
Yes, remember - Mercurius stands at the beginning and end of the Individuation process - first he presents as the Shadow (beginning of the process), and then splits into the Twins - the syzygy of Anima/Animus to complete it. That really is the whole process, except that then the Self takes over. I know little about that, but I believe there are encounters with Self figures, or sometimes people dream of Mandalas, which are symbols of the Self.

There are many names and guises for all of these figures, because Religious, Mythical, and Fairy Tale characters are all essentially symbols of Archetypes. This was Jung's big discovery (one of them). So after he had already come up with his own names for the various parts of the Psyche (Shadow, Anima/Animus, Self etc), he then went through and found which characters represent which archetypes. They present a little differently in each myth or religion or fairy tale, because they are all different renditions of them. So the terms Hermes, Mercury, Mercurius, Trickster, and probably many more, all represent the archetype that Jung had named the Shadow. Though apparently in Alchemy they sort of combined the shadow and the anima/animus into Mercury/Mercurius. There are doubtless many examples of similar mergings and splittings throughout.

You know how religions have gradually absorbed older religions throughout history? This means that various pagan gods merged into the Christian religion, and sometimes it wasn't a perfect fit. Sometimes things had to be somewhat finagled - certain gods had to be combined or split apart or somewhat modified to fit the existing Christian system. But there were many Christlike Gods for instance - the Dying and Resurrecting Gods, many of whom were also half-human sons of the All Father. Such as Dionysus. Hercules and Thor were both half-human demigods and sons of the all-father in their respective religions, though I don't think they were known for dying and resurrecting. Originally it's believed the gods of death and resurrection represented the procession of seasons - winter standing for death and then spring for resurrection. The world of vegetation would die, and the earth grow cold like a corpse beneath a shroud of ice and snow, the trees turn into skeletons stark against a grey sky. But then it would thaw and everything that had died would grow back magically!

Also the successive setting and rising of the sun - each day they could witness it's birth from the earth - it's womb and its tomb, because after arcing overhead it would then descend back into the underworld and plunge the earth into darkness and terror haunted by nocturnal predators.

These would have been miraculous events in primitive times when people had no understanding about how the natural world functioned, and when darkness fell they probably feared it would never lift. But it always did, just as winter always gave way to spring eventually. So the stories sprang up to reassure people - the older ones had experienced the miraculous resurrections of both day and spring again and again, and though they didn't know why it always happened, it always did, and so they needed to reassure the younger or more frightened ones, as well as codify the fact as a memorable story for the entire tribe.

These stories then were carried on through word of mouth for endless centuries and became myths and religions. But they refer to not only outer events (the rising of the sun and thawing of the earth) but also to inner experiences. Each time people fell into unconsciousness (sleep) they always woke. And when they descended into depression or terror it always abated - usually anyway. These events that happen inside as well as out ("as above so below") are rife for mythologizing. Plus of course there's the big one - actual death itself. This of course frightened people, and though they never saw anybody recover from it, the tales of resurrection that could be observed in seasonal procession and night/morning procession, as well as the recovery from depression/sleep etc, tended to reassure them that somehow death itself is not final either.

Archetypes part 1:
Ok, I've discussed what the Shadow and the Persona are in some depth, I think it's time to pull back a bit and take a look at Archetypes in general. After that I’ll tackle the Collective Unconscious - but to understand it you need a grounding in Archetypes first.

I have an analogy (imagine that! ). Basically an archetype is an Automatic Jukebox Projector. This is my own conception - I haven't seen it used anywhere but I think it's pretty apt, at least as far as my understanding goes. So, what the heck is an Automatic Jukebox Projector?

Think of a movie projector sitting on top of something like a jukebox. What does a jukebox do? It contains many records, and it can select the right one and play it automatically. Plus they just look cool, especially the classic Wurlitzer type. So, in effect a jukebox contains, selects, and plays. But ours is a weird kind of jukebox. It doesn't play music - it plays little movie clips, each with thoughts, memories, feelings, and a full range of sensory information included. Since it plays movie clips, it needs a projector on top. It could have something like a TV screen, but it's important that it be a projector, because projection is an important part of what Archetypes do. So we can add that to what it does. Actually, let's just combine/replace Play with Project. Simpler and more to the point.

An Archetype Contains, Selects and Projects.

But these jukeboxes don't take coins. You don't get to choose what they play - they choose for you - or maybe they respond to input from elsewhere in the unconscious. This analogy doesn't cover that part of the process - it's just about the Archetypes.

What exactly do they contain? Well your memories, but each Archetype collects certain ones. Let me break that down a little better - it’s not just memories - it’s memories that have strong emotional content attached. In other words the memories that were formative in creating who you are - if you experienced something that terrified you or that you were really ashamed of or embarrassed about for instance, those will go into a particular Archetype that's set up for those kind of memories. Jung named it the Shadow. There’s another one that contains your memories specific to how you relate to a romantic or sexual partner. This one he named the Anima or Animus, depending on whether you’re a male or female. And then there’s the Big One - the Whole Enchilada. The Self. Also known as the Imago Dei or the God Image. This is the Archetype of Wholeness, and it can help put you back together if you become scattered or fragmented I suppose. If something is too out of balance. Because balance is always the aim of these Archetypes, and of the psyche as a whole, which is made entirely of Archetypes if I understand correctly. I’ll try to explain that as well as I’m able very soon - and in particular give a description/explanation of the Collective Unconscious. But first it’s important to understand how Archetypes work and what they do.

There are more than just these few archetypes - these are just the big ones. Some of the minor ones (well relatively minor anyway) include the Mother and Father Archetype, the Wise Old Man, the Warrior, the Magician, the Beautiful Young Woman, the Wise Old Woman, etc. Think about the kind of characters that tend to turn up in fairy tales, myths and religious stories, and also in dreams. Because that’s exactly what all these things are - they’re projections of the Archetypes. They’re essentially characters that can be used to tell meaningful stories. Because story is the basic way our mind works - logic etc is an add-on that didn’t come along until we developed a full human level conscious mind.

Ok, with all that explained, what exactly do Archetypes do and how do they do it? Well, when you’re out of balance and you need a little help getting back, they kick into gear. What they do depends on the situation. It begins with some problem you’re experiencing.

Breaking here because this would be ridiculously long otherwise. Continued...

Archetypes part 2 - a Detour through Brain Science (the Rat Maze)
Let me briefly detour into Brain Science relating to the unconscious. One thing the mind seems to do in dreams is try to help you solve current problems, and it does it by delving back through your memory stores and trying to find similar problems you’ve faced in the past. Makes sense, right? Think about how you dealt with similar situations - did it work then, and if so what was the solution, and how might you be able to apply it to the present situation? What the mind has at its disposal is a reservoir of memories of experiences. So it makes perfect sense that it would develop a system of organic machines designed to store, sort and play these memories when needed to help you solve problems. After all, that’s essentially what the mind is - a problem solving machine. This is precisely why as Jung likes to point out it is compensatory - it has a tendency to give you what you need to solve a problem. And this is why dreams relate to your problems. At least at those times when you’re experiencing a problem - if you‘re not then they can be more of a random playground populated with memories pulled up by the Archetypes but not for any pressing reason.

Let me relate a section of a book called The Mind at Night. There was an experiment done with rats in a maze. They had electrodes going to various areas in their brains, and as they solved the problems of the maze - as they learned their way around it to get to the food at the end, scientists could see different areas of the brain lighting up. They also watched the brain activity as the rats were sleeping. What they found is that certain brain areas lit up like a christmas tree when the rats were learning the maze. They could see the brain centers lighting up in a pattern - and they even could see the pattern changing as the rats gradually learned the maze.

What they found was that if they let the rats sleep after tackling the maze those same patterns would repeat in their brains. The exact same brain centers would light up in exactly the same patterns as they did during the day, while the rats were trying to solve the maze. They could see the decisions being made at each turn, and the pleasure centers light up when the food was discovered at the end. The interesting thing is, they also used a control group of rats who were not allowed to sleep after solving the maze. Not surprizingly, the rats who were allowed to sleep got better fast - the next day they were able to thread their way throgh the maze almost perfectly from the first try. The ones who weren't alowed to sleep, and didn’t dream about going through the maze, didn’t improve as fast as the ones who did. It’s known that we do something while dreaming that helps us learn. Apparently what we do is retrace our steps - go over whatever experiences we've had that might help us to solve any problems we’re experiencing. It’s also said that durng dreaming we decide which memories to discard as useless and which ones will go into long term memory storage - because they’re important toward possible future problem solving.

The book presented a similar experiment with people. They got wired up with electrodes and played a video game. It was a skiing game - you had to learn a route down a mountain. So really it was a maze of sorts. They divided the test subjects into 2 groups - let one sleep afterwards and the other wasn’t allowed to. During sleep the brain centers of the sleepers lit up in the same patterns they had while playing the game but this time there was one added benefit - the scientists were able to ask the subjects what they dreamed about - a rat can’t tell you that. People reported that they dreamed about snow a lot - often of tracing a path of footprints in the snow. People reported stepping in already existing footprints. What would that mean? Well, it’s tracing a path that's already been made - following in somebody’s footsteps. Somebody who’s already been where you’re going. In other words, finding a path through the snow by thinking about where you, or somebody else, has already walked. This is a perfect metaphor for digging into your memories in order to help solve a problem.

People also dreamed about other things that at first seemed unrelated or only loosely related. Walking through houses buildings or streets, usually places they knew. In other words - memories. It turns out what they were really doing was comparing the new experiences to older ones. By dreaming about walking through a familiar house or school or street and comparing that to the new problems you’re trying to solve in the snow maze, you’re comparing and collating old memories with the new problem. It’s apparently the way the brain is designed to work. It digs through memories to see if there’s any information there that can apply in the new situation.

Archetypes part 3 - Projection. Conclusion
So, back to the Archetypes then. They contain, select and project memories with strong emotional content.

Here’s where things get really interesting I think. I made sure to say they project, rather than just play, and that's for a good reason. Because projection requires a screen. What is the screen they project onto? It depends. If you’re sleeping it’s what you could just call the Dream Screen or the Dream Theater. There’s no sensory input coming in when you’re asleep - the pathways from the sensory organs to the brain are shut down - you’re not seeing or hearing or smelling things. Well you sort of still are, but those signals are squelched way down to clear the mind’s theater for dreaming. So the Arcehtypes project characters and situations up onto the Dream Screen and create little interactive stories. Like little video games for you to solve. You have varying degrees of interactivity depending on how lucid you are - in most dreams it’s pretty limited.

But - what do the archetypes project onto when you’re awake? Onto people or situations around you. It’s a sort of waking dream, or a blending of dream with reality. If your mind decides you're unbalanced and something needs to be brought to your attention, it will do so by making you see what you need to see. If you’re being too tyranical for instance it might project images of tyrants onto people around you. It only works if there’s a ‘hook’ to hang the projection on - in other words it can't project a tyrannical image onto a person who is nice and friendly - they need to have some level of tyranny. So it takes the person’s actual characteristics and exaggerates them - twists them into an image of a tyrant. What it’s really showing you is a reflection of yourself. It’s saying "hey buddy - you’re behaving like a tyrant lately and you need to stop - here see, this is what you look like”.

Because that’s the essence of projection - it is really reflection. Something inside you is being reflected out onto the objective world (or into the dream theater) so that you can see the problem. Unfortunatley most people are so wrapped up in denial and excuses that they refuse to see it. This is why it’s important to learn how this stuff works - what it means if you get obsessed about something and start seeing it in people all around you - it’s probably something inside yourself that you need to deal with.

To be clear - what I’m talking about now applies to projections onto other people or onto situations that we see in waking life. That’s when it refers to something inside yourself. In dreams it can be inside yourself or it might not be. This makes dreams a little harder to figure out. Is the dream showing me that I’m being a jerk, or that somebody in my life is? Or maybe both? But the nice thing about dreams is, if you fail to understand and act appropriately on them, then they’ll keep telling you the same thing in different ways hopefully until you get it.

Ok, I think that pretty well covers the Archetypes as well as I understand them.

Thoughts on the Shadow and the Anima/Animus
Ok, the essays continue. I suppose these are the Ruminations the title of the thread is referring to. And while the thread seems to have suddenly died as soon as I started posting them, I don't think that's the reason - I think the handful of people who are into it enough to respond are just busy with other things. Which actually makes it easier for me to keep posting the essays rather than just videos or little question and answer exchanges etc. And writing these is really helping me to consolidate my own understanding of all this Jungian stuff. Up until now I was dissecting - examining the various parts and how they each work, and now I'm putting them together - synthesizing. You need to do both to fully process things I think. So back to it then - here are my recent thoughts on the Shadow and the Anima/Animus:

Why do they exist as 2 separate Archetypes? Why one based on sex and one not?

Well, that’s not quite where it breaks down actually. It’s about different kinds of opposites. The Anima/mus is about your ability to relate successfully - to other people and to your innermost being. This one needs to be developed over a lifetime of practice and experiences. It accumulates, like a skill.

The Shadow on the other hand - well, the experiences do accumulate, but there’s a basic difference I think. Hmm.. maybe accumulation has nothing to do with it. Maybe it’s simply that one is about relating honestly and the other is about repressing and denying that which we want to disown about ourselves. One positive, one negative. And together they constitute our relation to the world, to ourselves and to other people. To Reality as Peterson might say.

We relate by either connecting or rejecting/denying/repressing. A positive way and a negative way. And we’re constantly doing a bit of both, in very small ways as well as in larger ways. It isn’t possible to eliminate one and only have the other - this is the lesson of the Opposites. We must accept them both as integral and essential aspects of life. The only way to not experience life as an endless set of matched opposites is to live completely unconsciously - and the only way to really do that would be in a coma or asleep all the time, and even in dreams we do have a rudimentary level of conscious awareness - opposites are always showing up in our dreams.

The main problem with the opposites is this - one always seems to be positive and the other negative, and so most people tend to embrace one enthusiastically - sometimes to a pathological extent, and reject the other. By rejecting it we push it down out of conscious awareness - whatever you refuse to think honestly about disappears into the unconscious - into the Shadow I would say, and can there grow to monstrous proportions and take you over without your being aware of it. This is called Shadow Possession. You literally get possessed by the Shadow just like being possessed by a demon - in fact this is exactly what demonic possession always was. It’s also been called possession by various gods or spirits, because in the past, before we understood the unconscious and the way it works, people used to try to explain what it was doing in ways that seemed to make sense to them in pre-scientific times.

And even when you do understand the deep psyche, it still works to use terms like possession or magic spell, because these ideas perfectly encapsulate exactly what the experience feels like! If you’ve ever been under a really powerful compulsion that you couldn’t break out of, well that’s something you can describe as being under a spell, and that’s exactly what it feels like. Often you don’t even realize you’re under a compulsion until the spell begins to break, and suddenly people will look back and say things like “Wow, I had no idea what I was doing!”, or “The Devil got into me” or “It must have been that evil witch - somehow I know that woman got inside my head and took control of me”.

Women do have a way of doing that - or a man can do it to a woman. And of course it doesn't have to be across the gender divide. Love makes us crazy, and it changes who we are and how we behave. And not just love - sometimes a person can just get under your skin in ways you don’t understand - something about them just brings up things inside yourself that you didn’t know were there - they can make you turn into somebody you don’t even recognize. And often you sort of come back to yourself a little while after they’re gone and you wonder what the hell happened? Why did I say those crazy things - that really isn’t like me! well, it’s because something unconscious inside you was responding to something probably unconscious in the other person. It could be your animus was being driven crazy by their anima, or maybe your Shadow got activated by their Shadow.

How does the Shadow develop?
Well, I think it’s like this. I think beginning in early childhood we begin to make decisions about what is acceptable and what isn’t. And when we find ourselves doing something unacceptable we have a visceral emotional response - "Oh no that's a BAD thing!! I don’t do that! That’s not the kind of person I am… I’m a GOOD person!" Therefore that behavior has to go. Or rather, your KNOWLEDGE of that behavior has to go. You’ll still keep doing it - often we do what we do for reasons we aren't consciously aware of, and even if we decide it's bad and we shouldn’t do it - like smoking or cursing or being lazy or something - well most likely you’re going to continue doing it because you don’t really have full conscious control over your own behavior.

So when you find that you’re still doing it, you have an even stronger emotional reaction. Oh crap - I wasn't’ going to do that anymore!! What’s wrong with me? Am I a bad person? Do I not have any self control? We really don’t have very much. But if the behavior in question is something that’s really embarrassing or that makes you feel like a really bad person - say for instance lying to people or always being late or something even worse like stealing compulsively or drinking too much - well then you don’t want to face that the habit controls you (rather than the other way around), so one way to get rid of the guilt and shame is to just repress it all. Just make it go away. "Who, me? No, I don’t do that, what are you talking about? Oh sure, I USED to! But that was a month ago! I changed - you know that. I don’t do it anymore. Now I’m clean and sober.”

Especially if there’s a lot on the line. Like if your relationship is hanging in the balance - maybe your girlfriend has given you an ultimatum - quit drinking and all the lying and sneaking around that goes along with it, or it’s all over. And you tried - you really tried - but at some point you were drinking again, and it filled you with shame and fear, because you know now that the habit is stronger than your will to fight it, and people have simplistic ideas about willpower and breaking habits - they think if you fail at trying to break a habit it means you’re a failure (which is another example of simplistic black and white thinking).

So anyway, I think you can see how it works. A person who engages in some really bad behavior has probably been telling themselves for a long time that it’s ok - I’m not really addicted. I can quit at any time. You know, the standard excuses. Then when somebody challenges them to put their money where their mouth is and demonstrate this incredible willpower, they try it and discover it isn’t so easy! Maybe something really does have control deep inside and they weren’t even aware of it. Well, that’s frightening, and you don’t want to face it. It means you’re not in control, and some people have a compulsive need to feel like they’re in total control of their lives. So that leads to a snowballing series of lies and excuses, until eventually it’s obvious to everybody else that you’re lying and sneaking around and showing up drunk to work half the time, and you’re the only one who doesn’t see it.

And there’s this weird thing people do in situations like that. They’ll sort of half-lie to themselves, maybe even a little bit humorously, and let themselves get lost along the line between lie and reality. As long as they make the line fuzzy enough, they have a lot of leeway to pretend they can’t tell which side of it they’re on. Or to jump back and forth any time they get caught.


So rather than just outright boldfaced lies, they’ll engage in half-truths and pretend like they’re only kidding a lot. This is how sarcasm works as a defense mechanism - this seems to be a really big one these days.

The Shadow exists across the entire Psyche - Anima/Animus is a separate category
The Shadow is a global phenomenon. Every part of the psyche gets split into a Shadow part and a part that you’re consciously aware of. I think this is true of each Archetype - I mean I think each Archetype has its own Shadow component. The Anima /Animus has its good half and its bad half - a positive aspect and a negative one. The same is true of the Self - since the Self is the God Image inside the Psyche, it breaks down into God and Satan. When you see God in the world in some way - some miracle that is the work of God, you’re projecting your own Self archetype out there, and when you see the work of the Devil the same is true. As within, so without - as above, so below. In these phrases, above and within both refer to the psyche, while below and without refer to the physical plane or the outside world.

So really the Shadow is a much bigger part of the total psyche than the Anima or Animus. It’s the dark half of the entire psyche, both conscious (the Ego) and unconscious (everything else).

Maybe a better way to say it is that the Self is the totality of the psyche - both conscious and unconscious - so it includes all of the other archetypes. And it (the totality of the psyche - the Self) is split into a dark and a light half. So is each of the lesser archetypes. The split runs across all of them. What applies to the One (the Self) applies equally to the Many (the entire menagerie of Archetypes that make up the totality of the Self/ the Psyche). It’s a fractal thing - like a hologram. A hologram is an image that appears to be 3 dimensional, and if you break off a piece it somehow contains the entire image - every piece of it does in fact, no matter how small they are or how many.

Well that’s not quite a perfect analogy, because each Archetype doesn’t contain the entirely of the psyche, but each does split into a light and a dark half. But I think the idea is true if a psyche splits into sub-personalities - each one has a complete set of archetypes, each split into a Shadow half and a Light half. This is fascinating, and has the numinosity of a religious or spiritual truth.


Whenever we encounter some part of the unconscious we experience the Numinous. This numinosity is exactly why the phenomenon of the psyche have always held such power over people and made them try to explain its manifestations as spiritual or religious experiences, or as ghosts or myth.


Numinosity definition:
1. Of or relating to a numen; supernatural.
2. Filled up with or characterized by a feeling of a supernatural existence: a numinous place.
3. Spiritually elevated; sublime.
4. Stimulating spiritual or religious emotions.

Archetypes aren't always there - they Constellate when they're needed
The title sort of says it all for this one. I just thought it was important enough to deserve its own post. But yeah, these Archetypes aren't all there all the time - they sort of sink into solution in the morass of the psyche until something calls one into being. Then it takes form - Constellates as it's called, and creates images that are projected into conscious awareness - either in your dreams, fantasies, spontaneous visions or synchronicites, or perhaps by being projected out onto people or situations around you. However the images are projected, their purpose is to get your attention - to let you know something is wrong and you need to take some kind of action.

The Problem of the Opposites
In several of the newer books I keep running across the idea of the opposites, and the fact that they need to be reconciled or united. What does it mean?

The opposites are polarized pairs like hot and cold, dark and light, good and bad, etc. Above and below, within and without, the one and the many. Pretty obvious so far. But where it gets interesting is when you start to look at the important opposites in your own personality, or the ones that you see in the world that reflect things inside you. And the important thing to notice about them is that we tend to assign positive qualities to one in each pair, and negative qualities to the other. Up and down, dark and light - heck, positive and negative for that matter. Above and below, within and without. In each case one is considered better than the other, sometimes clearly and sometimes more subtlely.

This is important because often the one we see as negative gets repressed into our shadow. Or more properly the one you personally see as negative gets repressed. Not always, but sometimes.

For example - within and without. This can refer to many different ideas, but let’s use it in this case to refer to the psyche and the external physical world. One inside of you and one outside of you. For many people, the physical objective world - the word without - is the only one that has any reality, and they consider the inner world of the psyche imaginary or maybe they do suspect it’s real but they fear it or repress it for other reasons. On the other hand, some people believe only the inner world has any reality, and that the outer world is there but meaningless or unimportant. But of course there are also people who give nearly equal emphasis to each.

This last state - giving equal or nearly equal emphasis to each of the pairs is ideal. It’s what you want in relation to each of the pairs of opposites. What you don’t want is to have one sticking way up high and it’s opposite sunk deep into the Shadow, never to see the light of day.

For this reason, the pairs of opposites are a valuable diagnostic tool that can help you discover some of the things repressed into your shadow.

It works like this - you spend some time listing pairs of opposites, and deciding which one is positive to you and which one is negative. Then you think about the negative ones and try to figure out if it’s something you can talk about freely - without any embarrassment or denial or weird emotions. If weird things come up and you want to stop thinking about it, then that pole is repressed in your Shadow. I think there are degrees of Shadow repression - sometimes I think we just dunk things a little bit into darkness, and sometimes way down deep where the sun don’t shine, with many levels in between.

Balance by Darkmatters, on Flickr​